Arts

   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.

   The Southampton Arts Festival will present its opening concert of two Bach concertos tomorrow on the terrace of the Parrish Art Museum. “Double Violin Concerto in D-minor” and “Concerto for Two Violins in D-minor” will be performed by Dmitri Berlinsky and Mikhail Bezverkhny. The concert will begin at 6 and will continue during the sunset.

Modernism at Vered

    Vered Gallery in East Hampton is currently recognizing the centenary of American Modernism with a show featuring the work of some of its earliest practioners. “Celebrating 100 Years of American Modernism 1913-2013” will be on view through Sept. 12.    

    The show includes oil paintings by John Graham, Marsden Hartley, and Milton Avery, works on paper by Oscar Bluemner, Charles Sheeler, and Alvin Langdon Coburn, vintage photography by Coburn, Man Ray, and Alexander Rodchencko, and furniture by Carlo Bugatti.

   It was a world of disconnection through over-connection that Ray Bradbury foresaw in his 1953 short story “The Murderer.” A world in which people’s ears were filled with music as they walked through their days, staying in moment-to-moment communication through their phones with their job, their friends, their lovers, their families. Connected, yet isolated from the world around them.

    Timing is everything in music, dance, and comedy. Marcia Milgrom Dodge, the director-choreographer of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” running at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor through Sept. 1, has always had a perfect sense of timing, onstage and off.

    Born in Detroit, she started dancing when she was a child.

    “My mother took me to tap and gymnastics, in Oak Park, Mich., when I was 3 years old,” she said Friday. She continued studying dance until she went away to college.

   The Adventure Bandits Art Club will return to the Nova’s Ark Project in Bridgehampton on Saturday for its second art show there.

   Italian food, Mozart, and Beethoven are on the menu at Guild Hall this week.

    On Sunday at 11 a.m. Florence Fabricant will host the first of a series of discussions called “Stirring the Pot: Conversations With Culinary Celebrities,” this one featuring Lidia Bastianich, the chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, and star of her own public television cooking show.

   Geoff Gehman has a question for you. When was the last time you rode a bike through Wainscott without a giant S.U.V. over your shoulder?

   Surf Movie Night will return to Guild Hall on Tuesday with Jack McCoy’s award-winning “A Deeper Shade of Blue: The Greatest Surfing Story Ever Told.” The film is about the sport’s deepest roots, and its footage is “stunning,” said The New York Times. Mr. McCoy has won many awards for his feature and short films about surfing.