Bill DeYoung

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Visual artists have found inspiration and public support in St. Petersburg for well over a century, as a new exhibit documents through words, pictures and original works of art. Beautiful Beginnings, at the St. Petersburg Museum of History, traces the artists, and art educators, who first brought the creative process to the Sunshine City. And [...]

A longtime film industry professional, Tony Armer has done more to attract attention to Tampa Bay – specifically, Pinellas County – than anybody else with a foot in Hollywood’s revolving door. As the St. Petersburg/Clearwater film commissioner from 2014 to 2023, he worked tirelessly on the area’s behalf, luring filmmakers, videographers and advertisers here to [...]

When Jarrett Wolfe decided to open a new regional office for his national telecommunications business, he settled on St. Petersburg as the ideal location. It was, he’s 100 percent sure, a smart choice. Wolfe is the founder and Managing Partner of SmartChoice LLC, which provides voice and data, security, software, infrastructure and support to businesses [...]