Your weekend arts forecast: Rock, roll and a whole lot more

It’s a rock ‘n’ roll weekend, sure enough, with stages lit from stem to stern in Pinellas County – Largo and Clearwater, to be precise.

Friday at the Central Park Performing Arts Center (Central Park Drive in Largo, where East Bay meets Alt. 19) comes the hard-swaggering L.A. band the Young Dubliners. The band has made 10 albums since ’94, touring with the likes of Jethro Tull, Collective Soul and John Hiatt.

The music combines original, jammy rock ‘n’ roll with aggressively re-arranged Irish folk songs – comparisons have been made to the likes of the Pogues, the Waterboys and even the iconic Thin Lizzy.

Tickets for the 8 p.m. concert are here.

Saturday night at 8, the veteran Louisiana power trio Zebra has a show at Central Park (nearly sold out). The Sunday performance (at 7 p.m.) is selling well, too. Tickets for both are here.

Family affair: Devon Allman and Duane Betts, the respective sons of Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts, have joined forces to play the Southern blues n’ boogie made immortal by the original Allman Brothers Band. Tickets to see and hear the Allman Betts Band (as they’re calling themselves) Friday at Clearwater’s Ruth Eckerd Hall are here. On bass, incidentally, is Berry Oakley Jr., son of the late, great ABB bassman himself. Tickets.

All roads lead to Saturday’s 8 p.m. performance by Hot Tuna at the Capitol Theatre. Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady have been playing together since their earliest days as co-founders of Jefferson Airplane; Jorma (guitar) and Jack (bass) are two of the most respected players in the jam-band universe and surely beyond.

This show is billed as Acoustic Hot Tuna; tickets are here.

“I look at myself as a musician who just happens to play the bass guitar,” Casady told the Catalyst in 2019. “I realize what my functions are, and my roles; at the same time, I look at it more like an opportunity for an orchestral part, where you listen to the arrangement of the orchestral piece, the double bass will move into the cello range, then into the viola range and on up through the orchestra.

“When he and I play together as Acoustic Hot Tuna, we try to assign those different roles. Where if you close your eyes, it doesn’t matter who’s playing what. You just hear the music.”

Pride and more

Work by Perry DeVick for “Rainbow,” Mize Gallery.

For the June exhibit at Mize Gallery, 40 LGBTQIA+ artists were assigned a color of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple, pink) and given a circular canvas on which to express said color. Equally good news: Rainbow is the first show in more than a year with a live-in-person opening – 6 to 9 p.m. Friday (June 4). Chad Mize keeps open gallery hours on Saturdays and Sundays. Rainbow will be on the walls through June 27. (PERRY DEVICK)

Vinoy Park is the place to be Saturday for Pride OUTside, the first major event of St. Pete Pride month. This includes a health, wellness and outdoors festival with live music and other delights (7 a.m.-2 p.m.), a 5K run (pre-registration required here), a “Diva Dash” and more. Admission to the festival is $5, and registration for the 5K is limited to 750. More info on this and other Pride events here.

The St. Petersburg Shakespeare Festival has its first event in a while, Soliloquies For St. Petersburg, Saturday (6:30-7:30 p.m.) in Williams Park. Billed as a “move-through performance with distanced stations,” this free, all-outdoor production features a cast of women performing soliloquies written for men.

Most of the live theater action this weekend is in Hillsborough: Every Brilliant Thing, the one-man Tampa Rep show (with Ned Averill-Snell) debuts tonight (Thursday, June 3) at Ybor City Museum State Park (tickets are free; read all about it here). And Stageworks returns with the comedy The Lady From Havana, directed by JL Rey, June 4-20 (tickets are here).

From Heath to Hedgerow, an exhibition of early 20th century British ceramics by Doulton Lambeth Pottery, opens Saturday at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg. This sturdy stoneware was artistically designed, with pastoral scenes of the English countryside. Learn more here.

Please forward all event notices and press materials to bill@stpetecatalyst.com.