Expect No Violets at Guild Hall
This is not a week for shrinking violets at Guild Hall.
Friday night at 8, Benjamin Scheuer will perform his award-winning coming-of-age musical “The Lion,” accompanying himself on guitar. Mr. Scheuer, who has toured with Mary Chapin Carpenter, delivers a solo performance depicting his rock ’n’ roll memoir from boyhood to the present, in the process finding his inner roar as he tells the tale of four generations of his family. THIS PERFORMANCE HAS BEEN CANCELLED.
“I’ve tried to speak candidly about the most terrifying things in my life to other people,” Mr. Scheuer said of “The Lion,” “things I don’t want anybody to know about me.” “The Lion” was a 2015 New York Times Critics’ Pick and Theater World award winner, and won a Drama Desk award for outstanding solo performer. Tickets are $40 and $75; $38 and $70 for Guild Hall members.
Kathy Griffin, the comedian who, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Eric Sasson, “has been skewering celebrities and our culture’s obsession with fame for years,” will bring her feisty and sometimes controversial stand-up act to the venue on Saturday at 7 p.m. The performance will be followed by a benefit dinner at a private location within walking distance of Guild Hall. Tickets to the show are $250 for orchestra seats and $150 for balcony ($145 for members). Benefit tickets, which include premium orchestra seating and the dinner, start at $1,000.
On Sunday evening at 8, Charles Busch — actor, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director, and drag legend — will bring a new show, “The Lady at the Mic,” to Guild Hall. Along with Tom Judson, his longtime musical director, Mr. Busch will pay tribute through song and personal reminiscence to five legendary women: Elaine Stritch, Polly Bergen, Mary Cleere Haran, Julie Wilson, and Joan Rivers. Tickets range from $40 to $120, $38 to $115 for members.
Visual artists will move center stage when “A Moment in Time,” Lana Jokel’s documentary portrait of nine notable East End artists, filmed 20 years ago, will be shown Tuesday at 7 p.m. Six of the artists will be present for a conversation after the screening with Christina Strassfield, director of Guild Hall’s museum, and Ms. Jokel.
The work and creative process of Clifford Ross, a multimedia artist known for his “Hurricane” series of dramatic, large-scale photographs of wild coastal storms, high-resolution landscape photographs, and mixed-media installations, will be the subject of a conversation with Paul Goldberger, the noted architecture critic, Shirin Neshat, a multimedia artist, and Mr. Ross on Wednesday at 8 p.m. Admission is free.
Joe Lauro, a Shelter Island musician, filmmaker, archivist, and concert organizer, has dipped into his Historic Film archive for “Rock Rarities From the Vault,” a compilation of rare film footage of iconic rock performers, among them Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, all captured performing live in their prime. The film will unspool next Thursday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $12, $10 for members.