Arts

The comedian Joseph Vecsey is back, and Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor has him — as host for new All Star Comedy Shows to be presented tomorrow and Jan. 27 at 8 p.m.

“I like the idea of asking the viewer to think, but only for the process of thinking, rather than a specific idea,” he said. “I want my paintings to elicit that.”

“Most people are not familiar with the Latin side of Charlie Parker,” Claes Brondal said last week. The musician, who organizes the weekly Jam Session at Bay Burger in Sag Harbor, will be on drums on Jan. 14 for the fourth concert in a series that brings world-class musicians to the Southampton Arts Center.

Guild Hall has announced the five recipients of its spring Artist-in-Residence program, which will run from March 11 through May 7. Artists in the fields of literary, performing, and visual arts, and in curatorial/critical studies, were selected from 131 online applicants by members of the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts.

“4000 Miles,” a comic drama by Amy Herzog that won an Obie Award for Best New American Play and was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize, will open at the Hampton Theatre Company in Quogue on Jan. 12 and run through Jan. 29.

Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor is bringing back its popular winter program “Fireside Sessions With Nancy Atlas and Special Guests,” starting Saturday at 8 p.m. and continuing weekly through Jan. 28. The first concert will feature Clark Gayton, who played trombone on Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball tour and has accompanied such other artists as Sting, Whitney Houston, Rihanna, Prince, Stevie Wonder, and Wyclef Jean.

“Farms, Water, and East End Scenes,” a show of work by Aubrey Grainger, a plein-air painter from Sagaponack, is on view at the Quogue Library’s art gallery through Jan. 29. The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will present the next iteration of “The Artists View,” an ongoing program of intimate gallery talks by artists from the exhibition “Artists Choose Artists,” tomorrow at 6 p.m.

The Hamptons International Film Festival never sleeps. Just when you might think it is on a hiatus, along comes its annual Winter Classic screening.

Giuseppe Verdi’s “Nabucco,” the next presentation of The Met: Live in HD, will be telecast at Guild Hall on Saturday at 1 p.m. Placido Domingo performs the title role; his longtime collaborator James Levine conducts the Met orchestra.

Now in its 12th year, the Tripoli Gallery “Thanksgiving Collective” has become a holiday season institution on the South Fork.

Amid a flurry of holiday film releases and the inevitable handicapping of the races for Oscars and Golden Globes, “American Masters,” the award-winning PBS biography series, will launch its 31st season on Tuesday at 8 p.m. on PBS with the nationwide premiere of “By Sidney Lumet.”

The Drawing Room in East Hampton is open through March by appointment only. The gallery’s directors, Emily Goldstein and Victoria Munroe, have installed paintings, sculpture, photographs, prints, and drawings that can be explored in depth during the winter season by clients, architects, designers, and other interested viewers.

Jules Feiffer has been more productive in his 80s than many people are in a lifetime. Since 2014, he has published two graphic novels, “Cousin Joseph” and “Kill My Mother,” and next summer the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor will open its Mainstage season with the world premiere of “The Man in the Ceiling,” a musical comedy based on his 1995 children’s book of the same name.

“Dreaming in Vinyl,” Caroline Doctorow’s latest release, is a fitting metaphor for the approach she has taken to a life in music. With songs by the likes of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Donovan, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and Randy Newman, as well as two of her own, the collection recalls the pop-music and folk revival’s peak years in the 1960s.

“Twenty Sixteen,” an exhibition of new photographs and handmade books by William Eric Brown, is on view at Harper’s Apartment, the Manhattan outpost of Harper’s Books of East Hampton, through Jan. 19.

The stated aim of the Parrish Art Museum’s recurrent “Artists Choose Artists” exhibitions is to spark a visual dialogue between discrete triads of artists who work and live on the East End. Yet there is often a more comprehensive conversation that spreads between the walls and throughout the galleries, giving us a series of snapshots of current regional artistic practice and influences.

Tumbleweed Tuesday might be a thing of the past, but empty storefronts still proliferate in East Hampton Village during the off-season. This winter, however, the windows of at least one high-end Main Street clothing purveyor, Malia Mills, will not be papered over. The company has decided to make its empty space available to artists for a series of exhibitions, the first of which will open on Saturday with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. It will feature the work of the East End artists Bastienne Schmidt, Almond Zigmund, Margaret Garrett, and Philippe Cheng.

Christian Scheider will read Truman Capote’s holiday short story “A Christmas Memory” on Sunday afternoon at 1:30 at the Amagansett Library. The largely autobiographical tale, first published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1956, takes place in the 1930s and tells the story of a 7-year-old boy and an elderly woman who is his distant cousin and best friend.

After hearing a performance of a motet by J.S. Bach, Mozart was heard to exclaim: “Now, here is something one can learn from!” Both composers were represented in a program presented recently at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church by the Choral Society of the Hamptons and the South Fork Chamber Ensemble. Anyone caring about choral music, and community choral music in particular, might have uttered a similar exclamation.

In this time of Instagram’s palm-sized square images, it is hard to imagine walking through the cavern of Grand Central Station and looking up to see a 60-foot-wide panoramic transparency of India’s Taj Mahal, astronauts in space, a field of Oregon wheat, Machu Picchu in Peru, a seaplane on Lake Placid, or skiers landing by plane near the Matterhorn in Switzerland. Yet millions did, courtesy of an advertising campaign by Kodak.

The artistic career of Phyllis Hammond, a Springs sculptor, began almost 80 years ago when, as an 8-year-old, she took a one-hour train trip all by herself from Melrose, Mass., to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to sketch the Greek and Roman sculptures there. Not too much has fazed her since then.

The Southampton Arts Center will present “100 Years of New Orleans Music: From Louis Armstrong to Trombone Shorty” on Saturday evening at 7. Members of the HooDoo Loungers, including the musician, historian, and filmmaker Joe Lauro and the drummer Claes Brondal, will begin the musical retrospective with the Gut Bucket Blues and Jazz of Bunk Johnson.

Janet Lehr Inc. in East Hampton will open its holiday group exhibition with a reception on Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m. “Materiality and Process,” the fifth annual reinstallation of the The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill's permanent collection, is on view now through November 2017.

An encore screening of Kaija Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin,” part of the Met: Live in HD series, will be shown at Guild Hall on Saturday at 1 p.m. The opera, first produced in 2000, is having its Met premiere in Robert Lepage’s new production, which features glimmering ribbons of LED lights that extend across the stage and orchestra pit.

The Hampton Theatre Company in Quogue has added a new, one-weekend production to its 2016-2017 season. “Joy to the World,” a program of holiday stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Isaac Bashevis Singer, O. Henry, and other noted writers, will be read by members of the company tomorrow at 7 p.m., Saturday at 8, and Sunday afternoon at 2:30.

Looking at the happy, bright-colored paintings of Guy Yanai, an Israeli artist who has taken over the first floor of Harper’s Books in East Hampton through mid-December, a viewer might be tempted to decide they were a cross-pollinated canvas offspring of the visions of Jennifer Bartlett, Richard Die­benkorn, and David Hockney.

Two years in the making, the East End Special Players will bring a new production to Sag Harbor on Saturday called “Trouble in Jamaica.”

Ashawagh Hall in Springs will present “Short Days,” an exhibition of work by Anahi DeCanio, John Todaro, Annie Sessler, and Sarah Jaffe Turnbull, on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Sunday from 10 to 5.

The Southampton Arts Center will present “An Evening of Cabaret With Valerie diLorenzo” on Saturday at 7 p.m. The actress and singer is a fixture at cabaret venues in New York City and on Long Island and has upcoming engagements in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., and Sacramento, Calif., among others.

Last summer, Yuka Silvera found herself seated next to Tony Walton in a theater in Dexter, Mich., watching “My Fair Lady.” It was opening night. “Every time Eliza came out,” she said, “he would poke me.”