Those of us who missed out on debut performances of Johann Sebastian Bach’s secular cantatas at the Cafe Zimmermann in Leipzig or Edith Piaf’s singing at celebrated Parisian cabarets have a chance to attend a concert that promises to be pioneering in Southampton tomorrow when Spektrum Ensemble presents “The Cafe Connection: Music in Intimate Settings Through the Years” at 7 p.m. at the Southampton Cultural Center. 

The quartet, a group of like-minded musicians who are based in New York City and on Long Island, offers more than classical music. It evokes the atmosphere of European cafes, incorporating diverse musical forms and improvisation, and, depending on the particular program, guest performers may join in. 

“Spektrum Ensemble is unique in that we want to take the stuffiness out of classical music,” said Trudy Craney, a Grammy and Emmy Award-winning soprano who performs internationally. “It doesn’t just have to be classical, it can be popular, jazz. This concert is about the history of cafe society, how it came to fruition in Europe.” 

As an example, the group might juxtapose a Chopin mazurka arranged as a song by Pauline Viardot, a mezzo-soprano and pianist with whom Chopin collaborated, with a Piaf song, followed by a cello sonata by the Belgian composer Eugene Ysaye. The approach creates “a very dynamic atmosphere,” Ms. Craney said.

 “We talk about it and then perform a very broad smattering of music. We feel you can have a rather complicated piece right next to a piece that is so beautiful and acceptable that people start making an association between the two.” 

The other members of Spektrum Ensemble are Alex Pryrodny, a pianist who comes from Ukraine, Andrew Perea, a conductor, composer, and performer who has collaborated with Ray Charles, Itzhak Perlman, and Yanni, among others, and Rebecca Perea, a cellist who plays with numerous ensembles and also has performed intsernationally. 

“I come from a purely classical background,” Ms. Craney said. “Some of my colleagues do a lot of improvisation. Alex is a phenomenal pianist. Rebecca and Andrew, who are married, are so comfortable with improvisation and orchestrating.” 

“The Cafe Connection” will feature music by Chopin, Bach, and Puccini, among other selections, as well as Piaf songs, Ms. Craney said. “We want to build an audience, and recapture the excitement of live music.”

To that end, Ms. Craney said, she and Ellen Johansen, a pianist and teacher who lives in East Hampton, “have this vision of starting a loosely based ensemble of local, high-level musicians and performing in various combinations.” 

“We are so grateful to the executive director of the Southampton Cultural Center, Kirsten Lonnie, who is a real lover of music, especially classical, for affording us this opportunity to build music making on the East End,” Ms. Craney said. 

Admission to the concert is by free-will donation. 

An encore screening of the National Theatre Live production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” will take place at Guild Hall in East Hampton tomorrow at 7 p.m.

Simon Godwin directs this new production of the classic comedy of mistaken identity with inventive staging, contemporary dress, and the unusual casting of an actress, Tamsin Greig, in the traditionally male role of Olivia’s steward. Tickets are $18, $16 for members.

Also at Guild Hall, a screening will take place Saturday at 12:30 p.m. of “Hidden Figures,” the Oscar-nominated film about African-American women who played an important role at NASA in the 1960s despite the racism and sexism at its segregated Virginia facilities. 

A panel discussion with four female scientists, moderated by Max Gomez, will follow the screening. Tickets are $10 in advance at itirgirls.org, $15 at the door.

Bay Street Theater’s sixth annual Honors Benefit: Curtain Up! will take place on May 15 from 6 to 8 p.m. at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in Manhattan.

After an hour of cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, Scott Schwartz, Bay Street’s artistic director, will host a preview of the Sag Harbor theater’s 2017 summer Mainstage season, with performances of songs and bits of scenes from the upcoming productions. The evening will also honor the actor Richard Kind and the cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer. Tickets are priced from $150 to $500.

Bay Street has also issued a call for volunteer ushers for the Mainstage season, concerts, the Comedy Club, Music Mondays, play readings, and special events. A meeting for those interested will be held next Thursday in the theater’s lobby.

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will present the second in its Salon Series of concerts, featuring a new generation of classical musicians, tomorrow at 6 p.m. with a performance by the Israeli Chamber Project.

Founded in 2008 and based in Israel and New York, the group was named winner of the 2011 Outstanding Ensemble Award by the Israeli Ministry of Culture. Its members have won prizes as numerous international competitions.

The program will include compositions by Paul Ben-Haim, Robert Schumann, Jacques Ibert, Mozart, and Bohuslav Martinu. Tickets are $25, $10 for members.

Our Fabulous Variety Show will present its first 2017 production, “Tap: An Evening of Rhythm,” starting next Thursday and continuing on Friday, May 12, and May 13, at 7:30 p.m. at Guild Hall.

The show will feature Aaron Tolson, a Broadway dancer; his dance troupe, Speaking in Taps; the co-founder of the company Anita Boyer, a professional tapper, and her Dancehampton Tap Army and dancers. They will cover the history of tap dance from its origins to the present day through song and dance. Tickets range from $25 to $55.

The group will also hold a one-night cabaret called “Vaudeville,” on Saturday at 9 p.m. at Guild Hall. The show will feature the female impersonator Danny Ximo of the Raffa Show and the drag queens Naomi and Rusty Nails. Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 at the door.

Duchess, a vocal trio in the tradition of the Boswell Sisters, will perform at the Bridgehampton Museum’s archive building as part of Parlor Jazz/Art of Song series on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. The group consists of Amy Cervini, Hilary Gardner, and Melissa Stylianou.

The series’ hosts, the pianist Jane Hastay and the bassist Peter Martin Weiss, will accompany the trio. Tickets are $25.

The Perlman Music Program will present a violin recital by Kenneth Renshaw on Saturday afternoon at 2:30 at the Clark Arts Center on Shelter Island. Accompanied by John Root on piano, Mr. Renshaw will perform compositions by Bach, Mozart, Schumann, and Kreisler. Tickets are $25, free for students.

At 4 p.m. at the center, a free reception will be held for Virginia Khuri, whose photographic series “Spring in Mashomack” is on view there.

Finally, on Sunday, a free concert of works in progress by students and alumni will take place at 2:30 p.m.

In 1930, the artist John Graham wrote to his patron and collector Duncan Phillips that “Stuart Davis, [Arshile] Gorky, and myself have formed a group and something original, purely American, is coming out from under our brushes.”

This from a man who was born Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowski in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1886, served as a cavalryman in Czar Nicholas’s army, and did not begin studying painting until 1923.

Graham immigrated to New York in 1920 and had established himself as an integral and influential figure in the world of modern American art by the time he wrote that letter to Phillips.

In an effort to illuminate Graham’s importance, on Sunday the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will open “John Graham: Maverick Modernist,” the first retrospective of his work in 30 years. 

“He was often seen as a total eccentric and an outlier,” said Alicia Longwell, the Parrish’s chief curator and organizer of the exhibition. “My hope is to depict him as a player, a fully integrated painter, and to present more of a nuanced picture of who he was and what he meant to young painters during the 1920s and 1930s.”

The exhibition will include 60 paintings and a selection of works on paper drawn from 40 private and public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Graham registered in John Sloan’s life-painting classes at the Art Students League in 1923. Fellow students included Alexander Calder, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottlieb. In addition to meeting those artists, Graham was introduced by Sloan to Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair. Graham eventually collected art for Crowninshield, as he did for Phillips, Helena Rubinstein, and others.

The exhibition will open with “Self-Portrait” from 1923. Throughout the 

’20s, Graham’s paintings, along with those of Gorky, Davis, John Marin, Patrick Henry Bruce, and Alfred Henry Maurer, “were key in rejuvenating American Cubism,” according to the art historian William C. Agee, who contributed an essay to the exhibition catalog. At the same time, Graham drew and painted in a more figurative manner.

In the ’30s he moved in the direction of abstraction, with still-life paintings that used a minimum of color and linear forms, though he did not completely abandon figuration, as reflected in his 1939 portrait of Anni Albers.

In the ’40s, “he came to a sort of impasse,” Ms. Longwell said. “He saw what [Willem] de Kooning was doing, he saw what [Jackson] Pollock was doing, and he set up this idea of taking abstraction as far as he could. But he would never go on to the breakthrough of Abstract Expressionism. Soon after, he did a complete reversal” and began to paint figuratively.

In 1946, Graham had shows at the Pinacotheca Gallery and in the windows of the Arnold Constable department store, both in Manhattan. It was the first time his new classical style had been seen, and many people didn’t know what to make of it. “In my book, those works certainly look back, but they are certainly Modernist,” Ms. Longwell said. “The reaction was a bit like when Philip Guston turned figurative.”

Also at this time, Graham turned against Picasso, and produced a four-page diatribe in which he called Picasso’s art a hoax. He went on to ask, “Would it not be more modern and progressive to keep on the road of evolutionary development from the point where the old masters left off?”

In 1943 he met Marianne Strate, the mother of Ileana Sonnabend, and they remained together until her death in 1955. In 1951, she bought a house at 220 South Main Street in Southampton, and during the ’50s Graham was connected to the East End artists’ community, counting among his friends Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Fairfield Porter, and Leo Castelli.

Graham died in London of cancer in 1961. As Ms. Longwell points out in her chronology of his life, just before his death he wrote in a diary: “I brought culture to the U.S. and didn’t even have a social security card.”

The exhibition will trace the various developments in his work while also, through Ms. Longwell’s chronology, enumerating the many artists, collectors, and cultural icons who figured so prominently in his world. “John Graham: Modern Maverick” will be on view through July 9.

Theater only works if it is seen. It needs an audience, but an audience suggests passivity, as in filmgoing. You can watch a film any time, even one with a dead actor, and it makes no difference. You can always see Lawrence Olivier in the movie version of “Othello.” But you could never witness his monolithic performance at the Royal Court Theatre unless you had been there. Theater only exists if you see it happen. Like a murder. It only happens if you witness it.

So, Scott Schwartz, the artistic director of Bay Street Theater, cleverly invited theater lovers to witness new plays, still in development, all for free during the theater’s fourth annual three-day, four-show New Works Festival last weekend. Bay Street flung open the doors and let people in all weekend regardless of age or income level or cultural pedigree and made them feel connected to the process. Clever, indeed, because a theater that values the importance of shepherding new work is one that is looking to the future.

It was a weekend of no-frills theater, par excellence. No staging, minimal direction, and actors who barely had a day with the material. It was, as Mr. Schwartz explained at the beginning of the festival, “a chance for your mind to imagine the possibilities of the work.”

The four performances — they were readings, yes, but artfully performed by some accomplished actors — were each very different. The festival kicked off with “Molly Sweeney: A New Musical,” proving that our love for a Friday night out in the company of a heartwarming story set to music shows no sign of abating. 

“Molly Sweeney,” written by the late Brian Friel, one of Ireland’s greatest playwrights, originated as a serious drama in 1994. Before his death in 2015, Mr. Friel gave his blessings to the playwright, Eric Ulloa, and the composer and lyricist, Caleb Damschroder, for this musical interpretation of a story involving a blind but content woman, ambivalent about undergoing an operation to restore her sight.

 It was the most “in progress” of the four readings, with Broadway talents such as Mamie Parris, a cast member of “Cats,” Danny Bolero from “In the Heights,” and the rest of the ensemble all very capable of carrying a tune. 

Each show was followed by a talk with the production team. Varied and lively opinionated criticism is not necessarily good for individual productions or artists, but it is good for audience members who harbor fantasies of being a producer or director. The creative teams seemed more than happy to receive input from the weekend’s patrons, who seemed more than happy to offer it. One supposes that without intellectual, aesthetic, or passionate arguments about theater development, the box office is left to be the only arbiter of judgment.

The second reading was staged at 3 p.m. on Saturday, which happened to be a glorious, 80-degree day. Those who sunbathed during “The Impossibility of Now” by Y York really missed out. The dark comedy is set within the love triangle of a talented but unknown poet, her brilliant but brooding writer husband suffering memory loss following a freak accident, and a younger, callow but nonetheless irresistible dentist. It was definitely not “ha ha” funny, more poignant and intelligent than comedic, and exquisitely read by Jenny Bacon and Daniel Abeles, each with extensive TV and stage credits, and Karl Kenzler as the memory-impaired husband, who was another actor missing on Broadway this weekend, this time from “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Ms. York, who is based in Seattle, delivered piercing one-liners in response to audience questions, which provided some theater in itself.

“Did you mean for all the jokes to be funny?” asked one well-meaning woman.

“I meant for all the jokes to be funny,” Ms. York answered without cracking a smile.  

Roger Rosenblatt’s “Thomas Murphy,” a stage adaptation of last year’s novel, was presented in the coveted Saturday evening timeslot. The play is the story of an Irishman, an aging poet, an honest, whiskey-soaked family man, profound and stubborn, and losing his memory.

Mr. Rosenblatt is a longtime essayist for Time magazine, an author of several works of fiction and memoir, and now the distinguished professor of English and writing at Stony Brook University. No wonder the performance sold out days in advance. 

There was no shortage of drama on Sunday afternoon in the festival’s closing act, “The Cocktail Party Effect” by Scooter Pietsch, who was the weekend’s toe-in-the-water newbie as far as playwriting goes but has an impressive resume as an Emmy-nominated music composer and TV producer. In the last two years, Mr. Pietsch decided to try his hand at writing plays and has enjoyed early success, including a reading produced by Jason Alexander.

“The Cocktail Party Effect” takes place in Los Angeles one New Year’s Eve as three married couples celebrate 10 years of friendship, forged when their children were together in third grade. Now, the fledglings have flown off to colleges, leaving the empty-nesters to grapple with the realization that their lifes’ greatest accomplishment is done. Naturally, we draw from real life to create stories, but theater is where, some 2,500 years ago, we cast the roles of parents and children; relationships with God, lovers, mistresses, siblings. It’s why human drama works so well onstage — because that’s where the business of being human originated.

For Bay Street patrons such as Scott Cameron and his wife, Elaine Dia, who attended all four shows this weekend as well as previous New Works Festivals, the chance to witness emerging works in progress is reassuring for the future of theater. “It’s great to see younger people getting involved in theater,” said Mr. Cameron, “and coming here all weekend to show their full support of the arts.”

During the final talk-back session, a woman in the audience prefaced her question to Mr. Pietsch with, “I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with your work.”

“Trust me,” interrupted Mr. Pietsch, “no one is.”

That was theater. You really ought to have been there.

The Choral Society of the Hamptons has named a new administrative director, Elizabeth Zung, who has extensive experience recruiting and managing volunteer groups for fund-raising events for nonprofit organizations. She succeeds David Brandenburg, who has held the position for four years.

Most recently, Ms. Zung was the volunteer vice president of community events and a member of the PTA executive board at her children’s public school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where she organized street festivals that drew more than 400 people a day.

She previously developed leadership skills in finance, customer service, and employee relations while serving in management roles at banks in Minnesota and Westchester County. She also holds a New York State life insurance license.

Her work for the choral society will begin with arrangements for the group’s upcoming summer performances of the Brahms Requiem in collaboration with the Greenwich Village Chamber Singers, to be performed in Manhattan on June 24 and at Parish Hall, Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in East Hampton on July 8.

A frequent weekend visitor to the South Fork, Ms. Zung, her husband, and their children will soon become full-time Amagansett residents. A former choral singer, she will work closely with the society’s music director, Mark Mangini.