Bill DeYoung

Craig Pittman has a new book out, his seventh. It’s called Welcome to Florida. Nor surprisingly, that’s also the title of Pittman’s successful weekly podcast, which now has 275 episodes in the can and is listened to, he tells us on this edition of Arts Alive!, in something like 74 countries. The book, like the [...]

Synia Carroll, the Sarasota-based jazz vocalist who left a career as a schoolteacher and storyteller to devote herself full time to music, died Friday after a struggle with cancer. She was 67. Carroll was a frequent and popular performer in the bay area, particularly at St. Petersburg’s Palladium Theater, where she was awarded a Creative [...]

Filmed over seven sold-out nights last summer at St. Petersburg’s Mahaffey Theater, comedian Bert Kreischer’s fourth Netflix special premiered on the streaming platform Wednesday. Lucky finds the perennially shirtless Kreischer, a St. Pete native, riffing on weight loss (he recently dropped 45 pounds), his family, and taking parenting advice from Snoop Dogg. In 2024, Kreischer [...]

When Mike Hazlett and his wife Sue relocated to St. Petersburg from Boston nine years ago, they asked themselves: Why doesn’t a city this cosmopolitan have an independent movie theater? So began the tale of Green Light Cinema, which opened in early 2020, just before Covid shut everybody down for a while. Green Light survived, [...]

Ubiquitous in jazz, the saxophone is also a valued tool of the musical trade plied by classical players. The twain meet, somewhere in the middle, at Sunday’s Florida Orchestra concert at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater. Second on the bill to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet is a piece by French composer Guillaume Connesson, a concerto for [...]

After 26 years in the same cramped building at 719 Central Avenue, the Morean Arts Center is ready to move up in the world. The exhibition and education facility, which celebrates its 108th anniversary in 2025, received a gift Tuesday from Pinellas County Commissioners: $2.25 million in funding towards a new, state-of-the-art, five story structure [...]

There’s nothing soft and fluffy about The Pillowman, onstage through April 6 in a production by Tampa’s Jobsite Theater. British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s tale, while it’s essentially just people in a room, talking, is a potentially unnerving experience for theater-goers. Which was most like the playwright’s point. On today’s Arts Alive! podcast, cast members Georgia [...]

Spring has officially sprung, and April is blooming with more concerts, plays and festivals than the last couple of months combined. To borrow from the Fab Four, you know that can’t be bad. What’s the biggest of the big this month? Hard to say – certainly that’d be a matter of opinion. There are, however, [...]

Vinoy Park is ground zero for this weekend’s 50th annual Mainsail Art Festival, in which more than 250 fine art and craft exhibitors show and sell their work, and compete for a total of $60,000 in juried cash awards. What does that mean for us, the art-appreciating public? Assuming the weather gods play fair, it [...]

In the 11 years he spent on Saturday Night Live, Fred Armisen was always one of the brightest lights. Never overshadowed by the considerable likes of Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader and Kate McKinnon, Armisen was a utility player who created indelible characters, made the audience laugh, made everyone else look good and even made the [...]