The Bills from Canada Bring Their High-Energy Style of Music to North Central Florida
The Bills recording in the WUFT studios Nov 11th 2005
The Bills (formerly named the Bill Hilly Band) from Canada brought audiences to their feet at both the Gamble Rogers Folk Festival in St. Augustine and the Riverhawk Music Festival near Dade City in November of 2005. The band is known the world over as one of the most boldly innovative roots bands and has received two Juno Award nominations in Canada. While in Gainesville The Bills stopped to give a performance and an interview in the WUFT studios. Donna Green-Townsend has this band profile.
Just in time for Halloween, the Hippodrome brings you a story you think you knew… until now! In the Hipp’s Dracula the audience members will be immersed in a world of danger, lust and temptation as they witness an epic battle of good versus evil with only one possible outcome.
The young solicitor Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania for work, but after meeting Count Dracula and his lovely Vampyrettes, he begins to lose his sanity. Back in England, he finds himself in Dr. Seward’s asylum providing clues about Count Dracula for Seward, Professor Van Helsing, and the boisterous American Quincey Morris. They must also try to save the bitten Lucy’s soul while Mina fights strange temptations.
Dracula was also presented on the Hippodrome State Theatre Stage in 2005, albeit a more traditional version….and when Dracula was being portrayed by a character with the last name of “Bloodworth,” let’s just say the audience experienced some chilling moments.
Two wacky off Broadway creators, “Jed” and “Boyd”;, are in the borrowed Park Avenue penthouse of Mrs. Sidney Lipbalm to perform their new creation, an epic musical that spans the history of the world from the Big Bang to the present, for potential backers. Their play is budgeted for $83.5 million with a cast of 318 performers and 6,428 costumes.
Two zany creators accompanied by a third on piano perform eighteen side-splitting musical numbers, singing, dancing, narrating, and portraying every major figure in world and pop history (Adam and Eve, Attila the Hun, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Plato, Jesus, Cher, to name a few).
In November of 2003 the Consumer Product Safety Commission surprised many in consumer and environmental circles by something they didn’t do. The agency, which is usually associated with recalling unsafe products from the marketplace, decided to deny a petition to ban wood playground equipment made with chromated copper arsenate or CCA. As Donna Green-Townsend reports, the issue has some special significance to one Gainesville family