Arts

New at Halsey Mckay

    Two new exhibitions will open at Halsey Mckay in East Hampton Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. “Still Life With Woodpecker” is an interdisciplinary group show that looks beyond traditional definitions of still life to find new meanings in the specific and ordinary. Participating artists are Sarah Dornner, Paul Gagner, Ugo Rondinone, David B. Smith, Ryan Steadman, Torey Thornton, Lisa Williamson, and Kevin Zucker.

    The weekend’s musical bonanza continues at Guild Hall, where The Met: Live in HD will present Puccini’s “La Bohéme” on Saturday at 1 p.m. The most performed work in the Metropolitan Opera’s history, “La Bohéme” is set in the artistic community of Paris in the 1830s and follows the romance between Rodolfo, a poet, and Mimi, a seamstress who is his neighbor.

    On a windswept and rainy Saturday evening, somewhere on the cusp of March and April, a moody and sometimes sinister show featuring water and the sea might be just the thing to pull one out of a funk, or draw one in more deeply. Either way, “On an Eastern Shore,” featuring the work of Peter Ngo and Ingrid Silva, is a show that remains with you, rain or not.

    The John Drew Theater Lab will present “The April Fool’s Show,” a free staged reading directed by Chloe Dirksen, on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. The program will include scenes from a range of comic plays, new work, and “a song or two,” according to Guild Hall.

    Alan Ceppos, Peter Connolly, Lydia Franco-Hodges, Josh Gladstone, Kate Mueth, Bobby Peterson on piano, and Liz Joyce of Goat on a Boat Puppet Theatre will perform along with Ms. Dirksen, who lives in Sag Harbor and has appeared at Bay Street Theatre in “The Crucible” and, most recently, “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

    Fifteen years ago Julie Keyes, an artist, art dealer, art consultant, and real estate agent at Saunders and Associates in Bridgehampton, met Adam Tihany, an internationally renowned interior designer. The introduction, made by Ms. Keyes’s beau, Nathan Slate Joseph, an artist who works out of a barn in Bridgehampton and lives with Ms. Keyes in Sag Harbor and New York, changed her life.

    On a recent chilly night the East Hampton Presbyterian Church loomed dark and uninviting. At 6:45 a man emerged from a car on Main Street, walked around to the side of the building, and unlocked a door. Within seconds the soaring space was awash with light, and Walter Klauss, the guest conductor of the Choral Society of the Hamptons’ upcoming spring concert, doffed his coat and settled into a front pew for a few moments of conversation before rehearsal.

    Fresh from multiple appearances at the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences and Festivals in Austin, Tex., the Montauk Project marks the unveiling this week of their album “Belly of the Beast” with a Saturday night performance at Pianos on New York’s Lower East Side.

    PechaKucha Night Hamptons will return to the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill tomorrow at 6 p.m. Organized by Andrea Grover, the museum’s curator of special projects, the quarterly programs consist of 10 members of the community, each of whom presents 20 slides at 20 seconds each, for a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds per presenter.

    The Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton will screen “The Sugar Connection: Holland, Barbados, Shelter Island,” a documentary directed by Gaynell Stone, on Monday at 5:30 p.m. The film follows an eight-year archeological dig at Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island.

Calls for Entries

    A sure sign of spring is Guild Hall’s annual artist members’ exhibition, which will take place from May 3 through June 7. Artists wishing to participate in the 76th iteration of the show have been asked to submit their registration cards by April 18.

    Certain Moves, a five-piece jazz ensemble, will perform a free concert at the Rogers Memorial Library in South­ampton Sunday afternoon at 3. The group, which includes Abdul Zhuri on guitar and vocals, Bill (Bang) Gaines on keys and vocals, Charles Certain on sax and vocals, Randy London on drums and pans, and Wayne Hart on bass and vocals, specializes in smooth jazz and R&B.

    Jazz fans unable to make the Sunday performance can catch the band tomorrow evening from 5 to 8 at the Wolffer Estate Vineyard in Sagaponack.

    All Charlie Baker wants is some peace and quiet — from his humdrum London desk job, his dying wife, and his own demons. But when Froggy LeSueur, an English military type still with the barest whiff of colonialism about him, brings the staid British bore on a three-day job 100 miles south of Atlanta, a mishmash of mushmouth and cultural clashes ensues, with jaw-hurting hilarity.

    Photographs typically need little introduction: what you see is what you see. With Herbert Matter, it is a different story.

    “Beautiful Tree, Severed Roots,” a documentary by Kenny Mann, will be screened tonight at 7 at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. The film premiered at the Hamptons Take 2 documentary film festival in December.

    Ms. Mann’s parents were Jewish refugees who fled from Romania to Kenya in 1942. Born four years later, the filmmaker grew up in Kenya and lived there until she graduated from the University of Nairobi in 1968.

    Perry Burns’s East Hampton studio is far from Sarajevo, and even farther from Beirut, but Mr. Burns’s paintings and photographs bridge those cultural distances in unexpected ways. Although he grew up in Connecticut, during a recent conversation Mr. Burns cited a trip to Lebanon at the age of 13 as an important influence on his artistic development.

    The Southampton Historical Museum will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Pyrrhus Concer on Saturday at the Rogers Mansion with an afternoon of free programs devoted to the man who was born a slave in Southampton in 1814 and died a philanthropist in 1897.

    Concer was a boat-steerer on whaling expeditions and the first African-American to visit Japan. His estate benefited distressed sailors and local schoolchildren. One of Southampton’s most highly regarded citizens in the 19th century, he has been all but forgotten today, according to the museum.

Plein Air at Ashawagh

    The Wednesday Group, an association of artists who meet on Wednesdays to paint en plein air at various East End locations, will show new work at Ashawagh Hall in Springs on Saturday and Sunday, with a reception Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. Titled “Town and Country,” the exhibition will include New York cityscapes as well as local landscapes.

    The National Theatre Live series at Guild Hall will present the Donmar Warehouse’s production of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” on Saturday at 7 p.m. Tom Hiddleston and Mark Gatiss star in the tragedy of political manipulation and revenge, set in Rome.

    The Donmar Warehouse is a theater in London’s West End, where the production was filmed live on Jan. 30. Tickets are $18, $16 for members.

    As a composer, Antonio Vivaldi rather owns spring through the popular co-opting of his violin concerto “La primavera.” So it is appropriate that the Choral Society of the Hamptons welcomes spring with “Viva Vivaldi!” — opting not to offer a cliched response to the arrival of the equinox, but to give a varied program of joyous music by the composer and others to awaken senses dulled and dormant from the long winter.

    The Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival has issued a call for submissions to its 2014 program, which will be held at Bay Street Theatre Dec. 4 through 7. A discounted rate is offered to filmmakers who submit by April 1. The regular deadline is May 1. Submissions may be made to withoutabox.com/ login/12479.

    The Met: Live in HD returns to Guild Hall Saturday at 1 p.m. with Massenet’s opera “Werther.” The production, conducted by Alain Altinoglu, stars Jonas Kaufmann in the title role of the tragic romance and Sophie Koch as Charlotte. Victoria Bond, a composer and speaker, will give a 30-minute “Operatif” talk at noon. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, $15 for students.

Group Show at Drawing Room

    A group exhibition of paintings, drawings, sculpture, and printed editions will open tomorrow at the Drawing Room in East Hampton and remain on view through April 6.

    Work by Caio Fonseca, Christine Hiebert, Sharon Horvath, Robert Jakob, Mel Kendrick, Diane Mayo, Adrian Nivola, Alan Shields, and Donald Sultan will “highlight the rich potential each artist has mined for his or her inventive use of materials,” according to the gallery.

Five at Ashawagh

    HITFest, the Hamptons Independent Theatre Festival, has that its Summer Shakespeare program will return to Mulford Farm in East Hampton.

    Josh Perl, the founder of HITFest, said, “We will be performing for three glorious weeks under the stars from Aug. 7 through Aug. 24.” While titles have not yet been chosen, the production team returns from last season. John Landes and Peter Zablotsky will produce, Peter-Tolin Baker will serve as production designer, Richard Horwich will be the dramaturge, Kathryn Lerner the community liaison, and Mr. Perl will direct.

    The bluesy harmonica of Job Potter has long been heard at local open mike events and jam sessions, like the Sunday afternoon ones outside the Springs General Store.

    Auditions will be held on March 23 and 24 from 6 to 8 p.m. for the Hampton Theatre Company’s production of “God of Carnage,” an award-winning play. The available roles are Mi­chael Novak, a successful but unsophisticated wholesaler, and Veronica Novak, a socially conscious writer.

    “August: Osage County,” Tracy Letts’s Pulit­zer Prize-winning drama, will have its Long Island premiere at the South­ampton Cultural Center next Thursday at 7:30 p.m. The Center Stage presentation will continue through April 6.

    The play, which won five Tony Awards and was made into an Oscar-nominated film, is set in Oklahoma, where a seriously dysfunctional family gathers in the wake of the disappearance of its patriarch, a once-famous poet.

    The Bridgehampton Museum’s Parlor Jazz series continues tomorrow evening at 7:30 with “My Charmed Life,” featuring Greg Galavotti, a singer-songwriter-guitarist, in a program of old standards and original songs. He will be accompanied by Jane Hastay on piano, Peter Martin Weiss on bass, and Richie Scotto on saxophone.

    The concert, hosted by Ms. Hastay and Mr. Weiss, will be held in the museum’s archives building. Tickets are $25, $15 for members, and are available at bhmuseum.org.

    The Hampton Theatre Company is presenting Larry Shue’s comedy “The Foreigner” from next Thursday through March 30 at the Quogue Community Hall. The play is set at a backwoods fishing lodge in Georgia, where Froggy LeSeuer, a British munitions expert, brings his pathologically shy friend, Charlie. Confusion and comedy ensue when Froggy, to explain Charlie’s reticence, tells the other guests that his friend is from an exotic foreign country and neither speaks nor understands English.

    Film enthusiasts who missed Christian Scheider’s recent programs devoted to the films of Jacques Tati will have another opportunity Wednesday at 5 p.m., when Tati’s “Traffic” will be screened at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor.

    Mr. Scheider, an actor and filmmaker, will introduce the program and lead a guided discussion after the screening that will focus on the French auteur and comedian’s cinematic critique of the repercussions of modernization. The screening is free, but limited to 14 people. Preregistration is required.

    Bay Street Theatre is holding auditions on Saturday for its 2014 Mainstage productions “Conviction,” “Travesties,” and “My Life as a Musical” and for Literature Live’s fall production of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Equity principal auditions will take place from 10 a.m. to noon and from 1 to 3 p.m. at the theater.