Arts

    After several years writing about art critically, it is often surprising what ends up being surprising. Is it just the setting that makes a group show of East End artists so striking in a Chelsea gallery or is it the art itself?

    Guild Hall is presenting an HD screening of the current Broadway production of “Romeo and Juliet,” starring Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad, tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. The first Broadway staging of the play in 36 years, it is directed by a five-time Tony nominee, David Leveaux, and was captured on film on Nov. 27 by Don Roy King, an Emmy Award-winner. Tickets are $18, $16 for members, and free student rush tickets are available.

    The Wolffer Estate in Sagaponack is throwing its annual Mardi Gras celebration on Saturday from 8 to 11 p.m. The party will feature live music by the HooDoo Loungers, a New Orleans party band; an open wine bar, artisanal cheeses and charcuterie, and king’s cupcakes, a nod to the traditional Mardi Gras comestible, the king cake.

    Prizes will be awarded for the best mask and for the king or queen who finds the charm in the king’s cupcakes. Tickets are $75 plus tax and may be purchased at wolffer.com.

    Friends of the Watermill Center is a new, free membership program offered by the performing arts center. Friends will receive a membership card, a monthly newsletter, early access to open rehearsals, film screenings, and lectures, and an invitation to an annual members cocktail event.

    The Watermill Center is also soliciting applications to its 2014 international summer program. Individual artists from all disciplines who would like to work in a collaborative environment have been invited to apply. The deadline is March 12 at 5 p.m.

    Live on the Vine, a six-week music festival held in tasting rooms, hotels, and restaurants from Riverhead to Southold, offers an escape from winter’s chill now through March 16. Jazz, rock, blues, country, and bluegrass are on the menu, along with wines from 19 wineries.

    The best way to find detailed information about the more than 100 programs is to visit liwinterfest.com.

    The Russian Trio, an award-winning chamber ensemble from the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, will perform on Saturday at 4 p.m. at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton as part of the Music at St. Luke’s concert series.

    Featuring Nikita Borisevich on violin, Dmitry Volkov on cello, and Katherine Rick on piano, the group will perform works by Haydn, Ravel, Saint-Saens, Paganini, and Shostakovich. The Russian Trio has won prizes at several chamber music competitions and recently performed at the Kennedy Center.

    Not every artist manages to continue refreshing his work into his 70s, but Keith Sonnier, through the aid of a new studio space in Bridgehampton, has managed to do just that. The evidence is on view at Pace Gallery in Chelsea through Feb. 22.

    The artist chose his most regular medium quite early in his career. Graduating from Rutgers University with an M.F.A. in 1966, it was only two years later that he began working in the neon gas lighting that has defined his sculpture ever since.

Love and Passion in Water Mill

    The annual “Love and Passion” exhibition, whose theme this year is “Walk on the Wild Side,” will open Saturday in Water Mill at Hampton Hang and its neighbor the Sara Nightingale Gallery, and remain on view through Feb. 22. A collaboration between the two galleries and Karyn Mannix Contemporary, the show will feature more than 60 artists from around the country.

    Kate Mueth and the Neo-Political Cowgirls are partnering with the Retreat and Bay Street Theatre to participate in “V-Day, One Billion Rising” this evening at 7. V-Day is a global activist movement, founded by Eve Ensler, to end violence against women and girls.

    One Billion Rising is an annual event during which women around the world and the men who support them are invited to tell their stories, speak out, and dance as an expression of their demand for justice.

    The John Drew Theater at Guild Hall has a busy week ahead. The Met: Live in HD returns Saturday with a 1 p.m. screening of Dvorak’s opera “Rusalka.” Renée Fleming, fresh from her Super Bowl rendition of the National Anthem, plays the title role in the fairy-tale opera. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, and $15 for students.

    The free winter film series, presented in partnership with the East Hampton Library, is screening “Aliyah,” a French film about a young Parisian drug dealer who wants to make a fresh start by emigrating to Israel, on Sunday at 4:30 p.m.

    Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, age-defying former Beatles, performed together at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles on Jan. 26. Mr. McCartney picked up five Grammys, and Mr. Starr accepted the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award on behalf of his former band mates. He and Mr. McCartney, the latter a familiar face to many in Amagansett and surrounding hamlets, have maintained active touring and recording schedules into their 70s.

    Tierney Ryan, a jazz vocalist who grew up on Long Island, will present an hourlong program of jazz standards and original compositions Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton.

    Ms. Tierney, a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music who has performed with such jazz greats at Peter Eldridge, Bucky Pizzarelli, and Robert Lepley, will be accompanied by Nils Weinhold on guitar and Raviv Markovitz on bass. The program is free.

    Suzanne Ruggles, a naturalist, native plant specialist, and author, will give an illustrated talk on “The Tyranny of Landscaping” Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Bridgehampton Community House, as part of the Horticultural Society of the Hamptons’ lecture series.

    Known professionally as the Barefoot Gardener, Ms. Ruggles, who lives in Westhampton, promotes the creation of naturally balanced landscapes using native plants, and cautions homeowners about the environmental harm caused by lawns that require nonnative grasses and the use of chemicals.

    The Southampton Historical Museum has reopened, with “Downton Abbey Style in Southampton: 1900 to 1920,” on view through April 26, and several special programs. Today at 6:30 p.m. Deborah O’Shaughnessy will conduct a Linzer tart baking workshop, co-sponsored by the Rogers Memorial Library. Space is limited to eight participants, and reservations, which are required, may be made by calling 283-2494. The cost is $35, $25 for members.

    Those who saw Jack Ceglic’s work at Ille Arts this summer would have been surprised by the most recent projects in his East Hampton studio last month. Although the familiar revealing and colorful portraits of friends and neighbors were well in evidence, hanging on the walls and most available surfaces were compositions expressed in the blackest of charcoal pastel.

Yektai at Tripoli

    “Two Weeks in Umbria,” an exhibition of 25 new paintings by Darius Yektai, will be on view at the Tripoli Gallery in Southampton from Saturday through March 17. The paintings were made last summer during Mr. Yektai’s 14-day stay in Montecastello di Vibio, a medieval fortress town.

    Clare Coss’s play “Emmett, Down in My Heart,” which was inspired by the story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African-American boy who was lynched for whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, will open on Feb. 22 at the Tucson Symphony Center and run through March 9. Ms. Coss’s play was named winner of the first 2012 national play contest by the Tucson Alliance of Dramatic Artists in honor of Black History Month.

    “Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington,” a new play by Clare Coss now showing in New York at the Castillo Theater, thrusts its audience into the 1915 struggle within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: Should the N.A.A.C.P. be a philanthropic organization run by whites for the betterment of blacks, or should it be run by blacks with white support?

    Sawyer Avery, who is directing as well as playing the lead in Tuesday night’s staged reading of Neil Simon’s “Biloxi Blues” at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater, has a gravitas about him unusual for a 21-year-old. He loves sitting in cramped coffeehouses, talking theater and art. He attends two to three plays a week in New York. After sitting down Saturday morning at Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee on West 10th Street in New York, he was on his way to go museum-hopping with his girlfriend, starting at the Museum of Modern Art.

Busy Day at Watermill

    The Watermill Center has scheduled a full afternoon of activities Saturday, including an exhibition of new work by Jose Carlos Casado at 3 and a dance-theater work-in-progress by Jack Ferver at 4. Both artists are currently in residence at the center.

    A conversation with Rick Liss, a painter and filmmaker from Amagansett, involves poking around in the dusty corners of history, specifically the cultural history of the East End and New York City over the past 60 years. Some artifacts have disappeared; Mr. Liss lost 30 years of work when Hurricane Sandy flooded his loft building in the South Street Seaport area in 2012.

    The Lounge, a new music series featuring singers and instrumentalists, will open tomorrow at 6 p.m. at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill with Edith and Bennett. Edith Gawler and Bennett Konesni are musicians and scholars of work songs who play old-time fiddle and banjo music, Swedish dance tunes, and farmers ballads and hollers. Ms. Gawler and Mr. Konesni divide their time between Shelter Island and Belfast, Me.

    “Coretta: Promise to the Dream,” a one-woman show by Tina Andrews that dramatizes the life of Coretta Scott King, will have its world premiere on Friday, Feb. 7, at 8 p.m. at Center Stage at the Southampton Cultural Center. Ms. Andrews, an actress, writer, and director who has worked extensively in film, theater, and television, began researching the project in 2003. She developed a relationship with Mrs. King, the widow of the slain civil rights leader the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and recorded more than 120 hours of interviews with her in the family home in Atlanta.

    The East Hampton Historical Society’s winter lecture series starts on Friday, Jan. 31, at 7 p.m. The series, “In Their Own Words: Voices From East Hampton’s Past,” will begin with “Frozen in Hudson’s Bay: William King’s Log of the Whaling Barque Concordia, 1864-1865.” Richard Barons, executive director of the society, will narrate and Ken Collum, a trustee, will be the voice of William King.

    There were some disappointed patrons at Sunday evening’s screening of “Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present” at the Watermill Center who mistakenly thought the artist herself was going to be there. Instead the center, which had clearly announced this in its listings, hosted a panel discussion after the screening with three of the performers who participated in the 2010 exhibition of the same title at the Museum of Modern Art.

    The LongHouse Reserve’s winter benefit, to be held on Feb. 14 at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan, will feature a performance of “Ballads and Stories” by Bill T. Jones and Dancers. The Valentine’s Day event will begin with a reception at 6 p.m., followed by the performance at 7 and dinner at 8:30 at Adelaide de Menil’s duplex in the Gainsborough Studios building on Central Park South.

    The Perlman Music Program has scheduled three concerts by alumni at the Clark Arts Center on its Shelter Island campus. Wanzhen Li, a violinist, will inaugurate the series on Saturday at 7:30 p.m., accompanied on piano by Michael Bukhman. Future performers are Gabriela Martinez, piano, on March 29 and Areta Zhulla, violin, on May 10.

    Tickets are $25, free for guests 18 and younger, and include a reception for the artist after each performance. More information and tickets are available from perlmanmusicprogram.org.

    Setting up a season is the most important responsibility of a theater’s artistic director. Josh Gladstone, the artistic director of the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall, in conjunction with its board of directors, is halfway home to completing this year’s two-show season.

Gesture Jam at Parrish

    The Parrish Art Museum is hosting Gesture Jam, a hybrid figure-drawing class and social event, tomorrow at 6 p.m. Multiple models will pose with props and costumes, while the cafe will offer drinks for purchase and D.J. Mister Lama will spin tunes from his wide-ranging collection. The evening was conceived by Andrea Cote, a multimedia artist whose performances and installations have been presented at the Neuberger Museum, the Delaware Art Museum, and the Dumbo Arts Festival, as well as at various venues on the East End.

    A viewer doesn’t need to know Elizabeth Huey’s complicated relationship with psychology to sense something not quite right in the superficially sunny images on the walls at Harper’s Books in East Hampton.