Arts

    The Choral Society of the Hamptons has named David M. Brandenburg its executive director. He is a composer, co-founder of the Hamptons Shakespeare Festival, and music director of the Sag Harbor Community Band.

    Mr. Brandenburg will help produce the society’s June 29 performance of Handel’s oratorio “Israel in Egypt” Part II (Exodus) and Bach’s cantata 79, “Gott der Herr ist Sonn und Schild.”

    Tina Andrews will bring her new production of “Buckingham” to the South­ampton Cultural Center for seven performances beginning tonight with a preview at 8 p.m.

    Ms. Andrews wrote the play and will also direct it. It “dramatizes the aristocratic intrigue, ethnic scandal, and family dysfunction in the life of Queen Charlotte Sophia who was forced to hide her Moorish features and skin tone under heavy white Elizabethan makeup before her arranged marriage to “mad” King George III,” according to the center. The ruse was not discovered until their wedding night.

    The Parrish Art Museum will host a spring cultural celebration on Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m. Originally scheduled for February but preempted by a storm, the event honors the diverse heritages represented on the East End. Groups from the area will perform traditional folk dances and music throughout the afternoon.

    Guild Hall will present the Daisy Jopling Band featuring Chanterelle, Man­ly Men, and the Far East Fiddle Club, all from East Hampton High School, on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

    Ms. Jopling, a classical/rock violinist, is returning from tours in Europe to perform new arrangements of pop and rock songs, new originals, and modern arrangements of the great classics. She will also spotlight some of East Hampton’s young musicians, including Brandon White, a violinist, the Chanterelle singers, directed by David Douglas, and the Far East Fiddle Club, directed by Troy Grindle.

    Guild Hall’s 75th Members Show opened on Saturday and with it came the announcement of the winners selected by this year’s awards judge, Elisa­beth Sussman, curator of photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

   Over several weeks last fall, late-season coastal storms and the Sandy Hook School shootings overwhelmed human emotional response. People who lost homes are still trying to put the pieces back together and those who lost loved ones will never be the same.

Paper Retrospective

    A selection of Jack Youngerman’s works on paper from 1951 to 2012 will be on view at East Hampton’s Drawing Room gallery beginning tomorrow and running through June 3.

   “The best thing about theater is that it is a collaborative, and the worst thing about theater is it’s a collaborative,” Joshua Perl, artistic director of Hamptons Independent Theater Festival and director of its next production, Sarah Ruhl’s “In the Next Room (or the vibrator play),” said Saturday.

    The production opens next Thursday at the Bridge, a theater built on the stage at the Bridgehampton Community House in the form of a classic “black box,” with the audience seated on either side of the stage.

   The Southampton Cultural Center’s Rising Stars piano series will present Di Wu, a prizewinner in the 2009 Van Cliburn competition, on Saturday at 7 p.m. She will perform works by Bach, Chopin, Scriabin, and Ravel.

    Classically trained musicians ages 11 through 17 will perform works by Bach, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Albeniz, and Beethoven at a benefit concert for the Katy’s Courage Fund on Friday, May 3, at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater.

   Staff at the Water Mill Museum are accepting applications for its summer members art exhibit, to be held at the museum from June 20 to July 8. Photographers, sculptors, printmakers, paint­­ers, and others have been invited to take part in the non-juried show at which their work can be sold.

    A festive crowd will fill the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill for its annual Spring Fling, this the first in its new Herzog and de Meuron building. Drinks, including ales from the South­ampton Publick House, hors d’oeuvres, a silent auction, and music by Todd Barrie are promised. The co-chairwomen for this event are Susan Davis and Nancy Hardy.

   Four Bay Street Theatre supporters will be honored Saturday at a benefit dinner at East Hampton Point restaurant that will feature a performance by Joy Behar. David Bray, Ana R. Daniel, Michael Grim, and James Osburn will be thanked — and roasted — during the 8 p.m. event. Tickets cost $175, or $300 for a couple.

This is a review of three cookbooks, three cookbooks that could not be more different from each other. One is a wonderful tribute to local restaurants, their chefs, and the farmers and fishermen who inspire and provide for them. One is a charming and original book about cooking with flowers. And one is possibly the stupidest publication ever, call it quackery in a crockpot.

    Actors in the Round Table Theatre Company and Academy’s Speaking Shakespeare class will make their final presentations on Monday at 7 p.m. on the John Drew stage at Guild Hall in East Hampton. Admission is free to see the fruits of an eight-week master class on the Bard’s sonnets and scenes.

You are a whore. You are an old whore.

Everyone hates you. God hates you.

He pretty much has had it with all women.

But, let me tell you, especially you. You like

To think that you can think faster than

The rest of us — hah! We drive the car

In which you’re a crash dummy! So

Why do you defy our Executive Committee

Which will never cede its floor to you? If a pig

Flew out of a tree & rose to become

A blimp — you would write a poem

About it, ignoring the Greater Good,

    Twenty years ago, Jaqui Leader, artistic director of the East End Special Players, hesitated before calling Helen Rudman to apply for her current job. She was an actor, not a trained therapist.

    “I thought, I don’t have a degree working with people with learning disabilities,” she said Friday.

    Then she came in and met the group.

    “I realized I didn’t need a degree in psychology. Twenty years ago, and I’ve been doing it every Saturday since. We are getting old together,” she said, laughing.

Scratching the Surface

    The Southampton Cultural Center is showing “Shaping the Surface” through May 20.

     Arlene Bujese organized the show, which features work with tactile or more three-dimensional surfaces. The artists include Bob Bachler, Jim Gemake, Margaret Kerr, Pope Noell, and Charles Waller, who employ such techniques as assemblage, collage, textural application, and modeling of forms using fired clay, found objects, clay bricks, thick paint, and paper/canvas collage.

    A reception will be held tomorrow from 5 to 7 p.m.

    Shattered Glass is an appropriate name for the truly exceptional string ensemble that performed at Saturday night’s Music for Montauk program. An appropriate name because as the musicians made their final bows many in the audience felt as though something precious had been broken.

    “Alice Aycock Drawings: Some Stories Are Worth Repeating,” will open this week at not one, but two venues — the Parrish Art Museum and the Grey Art Gallery at New York University.

    The show, presented in partnership with the two venues and organized by Jonathan Fineberg, an adjunct curator for the Parrish, will follow the artist’s creative process from 1971 to the present through the vital and early stages of her ideas and their development.

    The Choral Society of the Hamptons will hold auditions for its next concert, which will feature Handel’s “Israel in Egypt” and Bach’s Cantata No. 79. Those wishing to audition are invited to sit in for the first rehearsal on Monday at 7:30 p.m. at the Presbyterian Church in Bridgehampton. Auditions will take place on April 29 with Mark Mangini, the society’s music director, and most rehearsals will be on Mondays from 7:30 to 10 p.m. at the church. Those auditioning should be prepared to sing a short song, for which accompaniment will be provided.

   Behind a black curtain, a shaft of light fell from a vent in the eaves of the South Fork Natural History Museum barn, dimly illuminating video equipment and stacks of twigs and branches. To eyes grasping for a way to make sense of the space, it was a welcome sight. To Christine Sciulli, however, it was a challenge.

    Dictaphone Group, which creates live art performances based on findings and stories produced through research on space and oral history, will present “Nothing to Declare,” a lecture performance that explores borders within Lebanon, those between Lebanon and its neighbors, and across the Arab world, tomorrow from 8 to 9:30 p.m. at the Watermill Center.

    On Saturday, LongHouse Reserve will open its grounds for the season with a riot of daffodils and some early cherry blossoms, among the other garden’s delights — some organic and some more structural.

Art Gets Its Groove Back

    This weekend at Ashawagh Hall in Springs, art and music will blend to form a show driven by a dance beat. “Art Groove,” in its third year, will present 14 contemporary artists with Motown, disco, and hip-hop music.

    Marco Albonetti, a saxophonist, and Annalisa Mannarini, a pianist, will perform a duo concert titled “Postcards From Dreamland” on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Montauk Library.

    Following a sold-out run at Manhattan Theater Company’s Studio at Stage II, “Murder Ballad,” featuring music and lyrics by Juliana Nash, an indie rock singer-songwriter who lives in Amagansett, will transfer to the Union Square Theater for a nine-week engagement. The musical will feature three of the cast members from its M.T.C. run, John Ellison Conlee, Rebecca Naomi Jones, and Will Swenson. Caissie Levy will join them in the role of Sara. The musical has received five Lucille Lortel nominations, including best musical.

  Neoteric Fine Art continues its series of free-ranging talks featuring individuals from the South Fork who are doing something, creative, meaningful, or different in their careers or hobbies. 

   Those speaking next Thursday at the Amagansett Gallery will include John Randolph, an artist and academic; Amanda Merrow and Katie Baldwin from Amber Waves Farms; Tyler Armstrong an environmentalist and educator; Scott Lewis who will presenting new environmental technology and off-the-grid systems, and Daniel Cabrera, an artist who will discuss the Quechua language of the Andes.

   James Katsipis of Montauk had the idea to join Kickstarter, an online site that raises money for individual creative projects, on a whim and a Hail Mary, he said. He had no idea it would go off the way it did. The photographer wanted to raise enough money to avoid exhibiting his work within traditional borders and frames.

    Bay Street Theatre has announced its second annual Honors Benefit, set for April 27 at East Hampton Point. This year the honorees include David Bray, Ana R. Daniel, Michael Grim, and James Osburn. All of the honorees support Bay Street, as well as many other local businesses and nonprofits.