Arts

   The Southampton Cultural Center will be alive with the sound of Broadway music on Sept. 28 at 7 p.m., as it hosts the one-hour “Showstopper Showcase,” a lively medley of the greatest hits of Broadway as part of SeptemberFest, a weekend devoted to art and culture in Southampton Village. The show was put together by Michael Disher, the director, and one of the performers, Valerie diLorenzo, an experienced hand at musical theater and cabaret in New York.

Figure Grounded

    Ille Arts in Amagansett will present “Figure and Ground” beginning Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The show will feature figurative work in multiple mediums organized by Vivien Bittencourt and Vincent Katz. The artists include Ms. Bittencourt, Rudy Burckhardt, Juan Gomez, Jan Henle, and Alex Katz.

 Mckay’s New Pairing

    East Hampton’s Halsey Mckay Gallery is showing works by Rachel Foullon and Ernesto Burgos through Oct. 6.

   Guild Hall and the Watermill Center have teamed up to present “The Momentum,” which was developed in its early stages at the Watermill Residency Program in 2010. It went on to be presented in Boston and New York, where it won an award at the 2010 International Fringe Festival.

   “It seemed like such a cool thing to do,” said David Browne, author and journalist. “Merge your love of music and love of writing.”

    Last month, Mr. Browne was a featured guest at Authors Night, the East Hampton Library’s annual fund-raiser. There, he signed copies of “Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970,” in which he examines these artists and their work in the context of the seismic political and historical events surrounding them.

    The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will once again host the OLA Film Festival, presented by the Organizacion Latino-Americana of Eastern Long Island this weekend.

    The festival, now 10 years old, will open tomorrow at 5 p.m. with “Inocente,” a 40-minute film that won an Academy Award this year for best documentary. It is about a young homeless woman who wants to be an artist. Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine directed. After the screening, Mambo Loco will perform Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican music.

Printmaking Workshop

    Guild Hall is offering an open studio workshop with Dan Welden, with sessions on Friday, Sept. 20, from 9 a.m. to noon and 2 to 5 p.m. and on Sept. 21 at the same times.

    Participants will make an etching using the solar plate technique, which Mr. Welden has adopted and adapted to make greener and safer etchings without dangerous chemicals, according to his Web site. Images are set on a plate sensitized to light and developed using tap water.

   Wendi Blair holds many jobs, but her favorite is that of photographer. For the last year, in rain, snow, wind, and hail, she has iced up and packed out fish for shipping from the dock at Inlet Seafood in Montauk.

    She has the biceps to prove it, but she also has enough photographs from her experience to stage a monthlong exhibit, “A Tribute to Fishermen,” at the Montauk Library. It began with an opening reception on Sunday and is open to visitors during the library’s regular business hours though the end of the month.

   In an era when Broadway productions cost tens of millions of dollars, money spent on pyrotechnics and special effects in an effort to make the live theater experience more cinematic, the Bay Street Theatre’s new artistic director has a very different vision.

    Essentially, Scott Schwartz asks a simple question: What does live theater offer that other entertainment mediums can’t?

   The Picture Show, Bay Street Theatre’s off-season classic-film series, will begin this weekend with a salute to Gene Kelly. “An American in Paris” will be shown tomorrow and “For Me and My Gal” will be screened on Saturday, both at 8 p.m.

    Leslie Caron joins Kelly in “An American in Paris” as his love interest, a young French girl engaged to a cabaret singer. He is an artist who finds a patron whose interests stretch beyond his paintings. The movie includes several musical numbers with Kelly singing and dancing with the cast.

    The Hamptons International Film Festival will include three films with Long Island connections in its annual festival on Columbus Day weekend.

    “Big Shot,” a featured documentary, is by Kevin Connolly, a Patchogue native known for his role as Eric in “Entourage,” a former HBO series. It is about the New York Islanders hockey team and how the team was conned by a Texas millionaire. It will be shown on ESPN this fall.

   Harris Yulin and Mercedes Ruehl will star in a reading of William Douglas Home’s comedy “The Kingfisher” on Saturday at 8 p.m. at Guild Hall. Mr. Yulin will direct.

    The play is centered on the love affair of Cecil and Evelyn, both in their 70s, she recently widowed after 50 years of marriage. They were in love once before that, and now Cecil is determined to have her once and for all. The humorous practicalities of physical love at a certain age and a fussy butler add to the humor in this romantic comedy.

   Tomorrow, the Parrish Art Museum will continue its East End or Busk concert series on its terrace at sunset with the Ebony Hillbillies, New York street musicians, with an accompanying barbecue menu presented by the Art of Eating in the museum’s café. The concert is free with the $10 museum admission, or free for members.

On View at Horowitz

    Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is showing work by Almond Zigmund upstairs through Sept. 22 and will open a show of Adam Stennett’s work on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.

   An anonymous donor has promised a gift of $300,000 to the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor if it can raise matching funds.

    The gift was in response to the theater’s announcement that Scott Schwartz will be the new artistic director for the 2014 season.

    The gift will launch the theater’s fall matching funds campaign. Tax-deductible donations can be made by clicking the “Donate Now” icon on the baystreet.org Web site or through the box office.

   Guild Hall’s Labor Day weekend schedule is full again this year, with a number of performances, screenings, and concerts.

    Tonight, “County of Kings: A Stage Memoir by Lemon Andersen” will be presented by the author, who is also a poet and performance artist. It is directed by Elise Thoron. The 8 p.m. performance costs $30, $28 for museum members. Free rush tickets are available for students.

   A documentary about junior golfers, the subject of the final film in the Hamptons International Film Festival’s SummerDocs series at Guild Hall tomorrow, wasn’t the first thing that came to mind for Josh Greenbaum when he was thinking about a new project.

Optical Illusions

    The Halsey Mckay Gallery in East Hampton is showing “Ether Scrims, Dark Rooms, and Calculative Planes,” work by Michael DeLucia, Bryan Graf, and Kate Shepherd. The three artists use “virtual and analog interventions in photography, painting, and sculpture” to explore geometry, pattern, and computation. The work is characterized by optical illusions resulting from placing multidimensional forms onto the flat planes of photography. The show is on view through Sept. 8.

Surface at Ashawagh

   The problem with acting in the theater, as opposed to film and television, is the live audience, Emily Mortimer said recently at the modest Amagansett farmhouse she and her husband, Alessandro Nivola, bought five years ago. “Everyone in the audience has paid for a ticket and suspended their disbelief; they’re counting on you and you’ve got only one shot. I’m always afraid I will break the illusion by shouting something like ‘Fuck the Queen.’ ”

    Tonight begins another packed weekend at Guild Hall. A stage reading of “The Whisper,” featuring Matthew Broderick, Jane Krakowski, Pamela Adlon, Jennifer Tilly, and Dayle Reyfel reading Eugene Pack’s new work about a girls’ night out weekend, will kick it off at 8. The evening benefits the Felix Organization, whose supporters were adopted as children and now work to enrich the lives of youngsters growing up in the foster care system. Tickets are $30; $28 for members, or, for prime orchestra seating and a V.I.P. reception, $75 and $70 for members.

   There is a cat-like air about Lemon Andersen. Quiet, reflective, yet always aware. It is an air he developed growing up in the street and one he will take to the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall next Thursday, as he performs his one-man show, “County of Kings,” at 8 p.m.

    “County of Kings” is a story of recognition and redemption. Poetry. Truth. It begins and ends with Millie, Mr. Anderson’s mother, Puerto Rican, a junkie, sometimes recovering, sometimes not, but always loving her son to the day she died of AIDS.

   Scott Schwartz has been named artistic director of the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. Mr. Schwartz is a graduate of Harvard University and a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. He was the director of “Golda’s Balcony,” the longest running one-woman show in Broadway history, and directed the off-Broadway musical “Bat Boy: The Musical” at the Union Square Theatre.

    His work has received several awards and award nominations. Other productions have included “tick, tick . . . Boom,” “Kafka’s The Castle,” “Rooms: A Rock Romance,” and “Murder for Two.”

    The Bay Street Theatre has saved its best for last, as it completes its excellent three-show main stage 2013 season with a hilarious production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” playing through Sept. 2.

    This production of “Forum,” directed and choreographed by Marcia Milgrom Dodge, takes no prisoners. You will laugh until you beg for mercy, and then you will laugh some more.

   The Parrish Art Museum will present “Atlantic Vibrations,” 14 short surf movies filmed from Montauk to Westhampton, tomorrow at 6 p.m.

    Michael Halsband, a filmmaker and photographer, and Mike Solomon, an artist known for surf-related themes in his work, served as jurors for the selection of the films. Those contributing to the event include Danny DiMauro and Tin Ojeda, James Kapsipis, Calvin Knowlton, Benjamin Potter, Brendan Regan, Ingrid Silva, Chris Stewart, and Christopher Thomas.

QF Gallery’s Tete-a-Tete

    Mickalene Thomas will serve as curator for the next QF Gallery show, opening on Saturday in East Hampton. The show features work by Derrick Adams, Zachary Fabri, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Deana Lawson, Nicole Miller, Zanele Muholi, Wangechi Mutu, Hannah Price, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Malick Sidibe, Xaviera Simmons, Mickalene Thomas, and Hank Willis Thomas. It includes video and photography from Africa and the United States.

    The curator is interested in the different ways gender plays a role in how black artists present themselves in performance.

   The East End Hospice will once again hold its Box Art Auction on Sept. 7 at the Ross School, but it will also offer a preview of the boxes, as has become tradition, at Hoie Hall in St. Luke’s Church in East Hampton on Wednesday and next Thursday.

   Sophie Chahinian can easily relate to many of the artists she profiles.

   Specifically, the creative process and its tendency to drudge up the fear of the unknown, the fear of execution, and the fear of failure.

    Earlier this summer, Ms. Chahinian decided that enough was enough. After several false starts, she finally threw caution to the wind and plowed forward on a project that’s been years in the making.

    Nile Rodgers, who has produced and co-written some of the music industry’s biggest hits including those by Madonna, David Bowie, Duran Duran, and Diana Ross, plans to bring East Enders of all ages together for a dance party at Martha Clara Vineyard on Monday night. The event will serve as the inaugural concert for All for the East End, a not-for-profit that seeks to support the other East End nonprofits.

   Tomorrow’s  “New York City Ballet On and Offstage” is sold out, but there are plenty of other diversions at Guild Hall this week to keep audiences occupied.

    Saturday night brings “An Evening with Laurie Anderson” at 8 p.m.  The performance artist and musician will bring her unique style of music and storytelling to the theater with tickets starting at $40 for balcony up to $100 for prime orchestra and a reception with Ms. Anderson.

   Paula Poundstone will get to her performance at the Bay Street Theatre on Monday much the way she usually does. “I arrive on an airplane and I remember that it’s a long drive in from where I fly,” the comedian said, speaking from her home in Los Angeles. “I take a quick nap, eat dinner, take a shower, and go to work.”

   After inaugurating a music festival here late last August, an outstanding new chamber music ensemble from New York City will stage the South Fork’s second Salomé Festival, with three very different events to close out the summer classical music season.