The Bridgehampton Museum’s Parlor Jazz series continues tomorrow evening at 7:30 with “My Charmed Life,” featuring Greg Galavotti, a singer-songwriter-guitarist, in a program of old standards and original songs. He will be accompanied by Jane Hastay on piano, Peter Martin Weiss on bass, and Richie Scotto on saxophone.

    The concert, hosted by Ms. Hastay and Mr. Weiss, will be held in the museum’s archives building. Tickets are $25, $15 for members, and are available at bhmuseum.org.

    Film enthusiasts who missed Christian Scheider’s recent programs devoted to the films of Jacques Tati will have another opportunity Wednesday at 5 p.m., when Tati’s “Traffic” will be screened at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor.

    Mr. Scheider, an actor and filmmaker, will introduce the program and lead a guided discussion after the screening that will focus on the French auteur and comedian’s cinematic critique of the repercussions of modernization. The screening is free, but limited to 14 people. Preregistration is required.

    A second program, featuring Tati’s “Mon Oncle,” will take place on April 9.

    The Hampton Theatre Company is presenting Larry Shue’s comedy “The Foreigner” from next Thursday through March 30 at the Quogue Community Hall. The play is set at a backwoods fishing lodge in Georgia, where Froggy LeSeuer, a British munitions expert, brings his pathologically shy friend, Charlie. Confusion and comedy ensue when Froggy, to explain Charlie’s reticence, tells the other guests that his friend is from an exotic foreign country and neither speaks nor understands English.

    Sarah Hunnewell, the company’s executive director, will direct the production. The cast includes Matthew Conlon, Diana Marbury, James Ewing, Joe Pallister, Ben Schnickel, Terry Brockbank, and Catherine Simms. Showtimes are Thursdays and Fridays at 7 p.m., Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $25 for adults, $23 for senior citizens (except Saturday), and $10 for students under 21, and may be ordered from hamptontheatre.org.

    Nevada is coming to Southampton on March 15 when the annual Viva Las Vegas! benefit takes place from 7 to 11 p.m. at Seasons of Southampton. The evening will include music, dancing, an open bar, and an hors d’oeuvres buffet. For those feeling lucky, there will be a Texas hold ’em poker tournament, a Chinese auction, a silent auction, and a 50-50 raffle.

    Tickets are $60 in advance, $70 at the door, and entitle a guest to $100 in casino chips. Tax-deductible donations support the Paul Koster Memorial Benefit and the Have a Heart Community Trust, both of which provide assistance to local individuals and families through social service programs and charitable organizations. Information and advance reservations are available at 283-6681

Many otherwise plugged-in cultural cog­noscenti of the South Fork might be surprised to learn that Philippe de Montebello is this year’s recipient of the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. It is not that the former and longtime Metropolitan Museum of Art director does not deserve it, but rather that few, if any, know he actually spends time here. He would like to keep it that way.

He comes here to escape the social obligations of his city life and relax, and only in the winter. A grueling weekend might mean that he played tennis five times or did some reading for work in an armchair while enjoying the view.

There were dozens of interviews and assessments of his tenure at the Met upon his leaving in 2008, but very few since he took up in the same year his current position as New York University’s Fiske Kimball professor in the history and culture of museums at the Institute of Fine Arts, where he gave an interview last Thursday in a grand receiving room in a mansion once owned by Doris Duke on Fifth Avenue and 78th Street.

This semester, he is teaching a course on whether the art museum as traditionally envisioned is still valid in a “post-colonial, multicultural, and global age.” While he is known for a certain conservatism as a museum director, he said that he enters such discussions with few preconceived notions. “As an intellectual, I pose questions. It can be debated one way or another.” Running a museum required action primarily, even when guided by thought. “I’ve gone from being a man of action to a man of reflection.”

His immersion in a more theoretical world with students of varied backgrounds, has not, “oddly enough,” changed his viewpoint on such issues. “I may think about things more slightly diffusely, but I would say over all my current thinking about things is not all that different from where my intuition once led me.” Some of this he credits to his continuing involvement in the museum world’s curatorial affairs, where “there are physical, legal, and other constraints that scholars don’t have to face” while considering more utopian views.

In addition to his teaching duties, he still serves on several non-voting committees at the Met and is on the board of the Prado Museum in Madrid, from where he had just flown back the preceding day, and recently finished a four-year term on the board at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. With Paula Zahn, he hosts a weekly show on WNET-Channel 13 about the arts in New York City.

“I have plenty to do and no time to look back. I walked out the door, closed it behind me,” he said. “I had the good fortune that when I became director in 1977 Tom Hoving never stepped back, never called me. It’s very good for one, and I respect my successor’s need to be his own person.”

Thomas P. Campbell, who has been director since Mr. de Montebello left, has, by all accounts, kept the Met on a steady course since he took over but has yet to become as synonymous with the institution as his predecessor. If he has a similar tenure, he still has decades to do so. The former colleagues do still have lunch.

“If he wants to chat with me, which he does occasionally, he does. Otherwise, once you leave, you leave,” Mr. de Montebello said.

Upon his leaving the Met, its curators feted him with an exhibition honoring his achievements, primarily the expansion of the physical structure and the individual galleries of the museum and his encouragement of a vigorous and engaged acquisitions program across all departments. The effort belied a public perception that he favored some areas of the museum over others because of his background as a curator in European paintings.

“There was never a favorite work for 31 years and there isn’t one now,” not even a shortlist when he visits now for pleasure or brings classes. “I move around. I’m not tied only to paintings, either. I go to the Islamic galleries, the Egyptian galleries. I am eager to see what the new curator will do with the European decorative arts and sculpture galleries. I’m watching it. I’m only one block away.”

While the museum did acquire significant historical European works under his tenure, including Caravaggio’s “The Denial of Saint Peter,” one of very few works by the artist in America (or anywhere else for that matter), there were many similar acquisitions in each department, including contemporary art, which grew steadily in the past two decades.

One of the prominent works acquired during his directorship came from the estate of Robert David Lion Gardiner, the descendant of the first English settler of East Hampton, and was purchased at Christie’s auction house. The Chippendale chest on chest, made by a relatively unknown member of the Townsend cabinet-making family of Newport, R.I., was acquired for $750,000 by Morrison H. Heckscher, the chairman of the American Wing of the Met. At the time, Mr. Heckscher was hesitant to identify himself, because he said his bosses did not know he was at the auction or planning to buy anything.

Mr. de Montebello said it was not likely that Mr. Heckscher or any one of his fellow department heads would have been censured for such a purchase. They have price limits to which they can bid without receiving prior approval. “The trustees and director recognize that, within reason, a certain amount of discretion and flexibility is necessary, and if not exercised, we may scold a curator for not being enterprising enough.”

Despite the prevalence of the idea that the actual object is losing ground to academic theories and increased digitization, he said such notions were overwrought. With better displays, lighting, and labels, he said, there is much more to engage the viewer. “I think the role of the museum is to make things accessible, make it as attractive as possible, make engagement with the work as comfortable as possible, and as rewarding as possible, both intellectually and visually. Once you’ve established lighting, text, the conversations among the works, the way you place them side by side and the distance, then it’s up to the visitor. I don’t think curators should go around with bludgeons and compel people to do anything.”

He said museums are still filled with people looking at objects. “Too many do it through the lens of their camera, but those are not the people, in my view, who would have looked at objects that long anyway.”

The role of money in the museum world and the stress to act like a business are real, he acknowledged, but never held much sway at the Met. “There are no hedge-funders trying to wield influence.” He added that given the Met’s size, with 2,500 full-time employees and 110 curatorial titles, “it would be very difficult for any single person to tip the balance one way or the other. It’s a much bigger problem in contemporary museums, which are by design smaller, and smaller institutions have smaller ratios” of professional staff to trustees.

He said the number of museums being compelled to run like businesses is troubling. In the case of the Met, “the curators are the museum and the museum is about art. How well it is run from a purely administrative point of view is a very incidental thing.” Visitors are not coming to the Met because of a particular department’s bottom line. They are interested, he said, in the variety and quality of the exhibitions, the intellectual life of the place. “Obviously you need to balance the budget if you can and be run efficiently. Yet, there is a major difference between being run in a business-like manner and being run like a business.”

Despite an aristocratic title, which he does not use (his birth name is Count Guy Philippe Henri Lannes de Montebello), and his descent from two people who inspired main characters in Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” Mr. de Montebello said he has little use for such distinctions. “It’s of archival interest, a footnote. We live in a meritocracy. My background never hurt. Some level of privilege is helpful. But I couldn’t flub an exhibition and say ‘but I’m a descendant of so-and-so.’ ” He added that he was also descended from the Marquis de Sade. “My family likes to point that out whenever I get nasty with them.”

An American citizen, he chose to remain in this country when his family decided to return to France after moving here in his youth. Comfortable in both cultures, he said, “I am the most French of everyone in my family.” Fluent in several languages, he said he enjoys reading, writing, and speaking to his family in French.

He is at work on several writing projects, but do not expect a “tell-all” account of his years at the Met. It is not of interest, he said, and even if it were, he noted he did not have his agendas from those early years, and it would be difficult to reconstruct his tenure there without them.

Group Show at Drawing Room

    A group exhibition of paintings, drawings, sculpture, and printed editions will open tomorrow at the Drawing Room in East Hampton and remain on view through April 6.

    Work by Caio Fonseca, Christine Hiebert, Sharon Horvath, Robert Jakob, Mel Kendrick, Diane Mayo, Adrian Nivola, Alan Shields, and Donald Sultan will “highlight the rich potential each artist has mined for his or her inventive use of materials,” according to the gallery.

Five at Ashawagh

    “Under the Influence,” a group exhibition featuring Sara Coe, Pam Collins Focarino, Ruby Jackson, Tracy Jamar, and Rose Zelenetz will be on view Saturday and Sunday at Ashawagh Hall in Springs, with a reception Saturday from 5 to 7:30 p.m.

    The group first exhibited together last March, when all were docents at the Pollock-Krasner house. Allan Kronzek, Ms. Jackson’s husband, suggested the exhibition title as a playful reference to Pollock’s drinking as well as to artistic inspiration. According to Ms. Jamar, a fiber artist, “Though not directly motivated by Jackson and Lee, how could we not find ourselves under their influence on some level?”

Photo Exhibit at John Jermain

    Elaine McKay, a Sag Harbor artist who creates photographs with handmade pinhole cameras, will have a solo exhibition at John Jermain Memorial Library from Tuesday through April 30. A pinhole camera consists of a lightproof chamber with a hole in one wall. Light passes through the aperture and projects an inverted image onto photographic film.

    Ms. McKay constructs her cameras from cardboard and tape and uses long exposures to create photographs that have a dreamy quality. Each of her images incorporates text written by the artist.

    A reception will be held March 22 from 3 to 5 p.m. The artist will discuss her work on April 2 at 5:30 p.m.  

SCC Winner’s Circle

    “Winner’s Circle,” featuring work by the three artists selected from the Southampton Cultural Center’s September 2013 juried exhibition, will be on view from Tuesday through April 14 at the Levitas Center for the Arts.

    Helen Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, chose Susan Newmark, Christina Stow, and Charles Yoder from among the 40 she originally selected for the exhibition last fall.

    Ms. Newmark, who lives in Brooklyn, makes imaginary landscapes integrated with abstract elements, building up layers of collaged papers from comics, wallpaper photographs, and paint.

    Ms. Snow is a photographer inspired by objects such as eggshells, dolls, and bulbs, which provide her compositions with a sense of graphic design. She lives in Shinnecock Hills.

    Mr. Yoder’s large paintings depict details of unpopulated landscapes, where light, shadow, and shade create meditative compositions. He lives in New York.

    A reception will he held March 22 from 5 to 7 p.m.

    “August: Osage County,” Tracy Letts’s Pulit­zer Prize-winning drama, will have its Long Island premiere at the South­ampton Cultural Center next Thursday at 7:30 p.m. The Center Stage presentation will continue through April 6.

    The play, which won five Tony Awards and was made into an Oscar-nominated film, is set in Oklahoma, where a seriously dysfunctional family gathers in the wake of the disappearance of its patriarch, a once-famous poet.

    Directed by Michael Disher, the production features Paul Consiglio, Bonnie Grice, Samantha Honig, John Leonard, Joan Lyons, Joseph Marshall, Linda McKnight, Philip Reichert, Stephan Scheck, Emily Selyukova, Mark Strecker, Josephine Wallace, and Edna Winston.

    General admission is $22, $20 for senior citizens on Fridays only, and $12 for students under 21. Show times are Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sunday afternoons at 2:30.

    Auditions will be held on March 23 and 24 from 6 to 8 p.m. for the Hampton Theatre Company’s production of “God of Carnage,” an award-winning play. The available roles are Mi­chael Novak, a successful but unsophisticated wholesaler, and Veronica Novak, a socially conscious writer.

    Audition readings, open to both union and nonunion actors and held at the Quogue Community Hall, will be from the script. Neither prepared monologues nor appointments are necessary. Actors unable to attend the scheduled auditions have been invited to contact the company to arrange for an alternate time.

    Rehearsals will begin in mid-April. Performances will run from May 22 through June 8. More information is available at hamptontheatre.org.

    While the founding families of Shelter Island — the Sylvesters, the Havenses, the Nicolls — are well-known cornerstones of the island’s history, the slaves and Native Americans who built and inhabited the island are not as widely recognized. “Race and Ethnicity on Shelter Island: 1652-2000,” a new exhibition at the Shelter Island Historical Society, celebrates their role in the island’s history.

    Nancy Jaicks, a retired professor of history at New York University and part-time island resident, will discuss this aspect of the island’s past Saturday at 1 p.m. at the Havens House Museum. The reception will include light refreshments.

    “The minorities on the island have always been here but have never been acknowledged in an exhibition,” said Nanette Lawrenson, executive director of the society. “There has never been much attention devoted to their lives, their challenges, and how they overcame them and became successful here.”

    Patricia Shillingburg, who with her husband, Edward, has written a number of books on the island’s early history, explained that Nathaniel Sylvester purchased the entire island in 1652. It had been part of the original Plymouth Company land grant made by James I of England in 1620. The Shelter Island property was primarily a provisioning plantation for the family’s sugar plantation in Barbados. The Sylvesters arrived on the island with slaves, who built the original house.

    A recent five-year dig at Sylvester Manor has turned up information about the three cultures living on the island at the same time — European, African, and Native American. The exhibition includes examples from the historical society’s collection of Native American tools, blades, and other artifacts, some of which date from 1000 B.C.

    Sylvester Manor Educational Farm recently held two events related to the themes of the exhibit. “Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North,” a PBS documentary on one extended family’s investigation of its history of slavery, was screened at the Shelter Island library on Friday. On Saturday morning a community remembrance was held at the Sylvester Manor burial ground, where 200 slaves, Native Americans, and freedmen are interred.

    After Nathaniel Sylvester’s death in 1680, his son Giles sold what is now the Mashomack Preserve to William Nicoll, a successful New York lawyer who owned the land that is now Islip. Soon after, George Havens, another newcomer, purchased 1,000 acres from Nathaniel II.

    After the American Revolution, many local landowners felt they should free their slaves. According to Dr. Jaicks, it is unclear how much of this was voluntary and how much was due to New York laws. According to the 1790 census, out of an island population of 200, 40 were either slaves or freedmen. Some went into whaling and became successful, though when the local whaling industry peaked in the 1840s, many relocated to the ports of New York City.

    Several African-American families remained on the island, one of whom, the Hempsteads, sent two volunteers, James Madison and Henry, to fight in the Civil War with the U.S. Colored Troop Regiments. While James Madison died in a Union hospital in 1864, his brother Henry fought, then married, started a family, and farmed his own property until his death in 1907.

    The Scott family arrived in the late 1800s, just as the Hempsteads were dying out. Albert Scott was a slave in Virginia who had been tortured and wounded so he couldn’t run away. Nonetheless, he made his way north to work for David Gardiner on Gardiner’s Island, where Vincent Joseph, a Montauk Indian, was also employed. It is not certain if Albert was still enslaved at that time. David Gardiner was anti-slavery, but his sister Julia, who later married President John Tyler, held the opposite view.

    Albert Scott married Elizabeth Jo­seph, a Montauk Indian who lived in East Hampton and, along with Vincent Joseph, moved to Shelter Island. In 1922 the Scotts’ daughter Laura married Benjamin Chase, an African-American photographer from Brooklyn. Just as the Hempsteads lasted through the 19th century, the Scott and Chase families remained a presence on the island until Benjamin Chase’s death in 1997.

    Many freedmen came north after reconstruction ended because life in the south had become unbearable. Some came to Shelter Island to work in the hotels. The exhibition includes, among its many documents, a manumission, or emancipation, certificate. To be freed, one had to be younger than 50 and able to be self-supporting.

    Among the other documents on view are the baptismal records of St. Mary’s church, including those for the three Scott children. A ledger from the school shows the attendance records. In addition to photographs, documents, and artifacts, there is a timeline that traces the island’s history from 1652 to the present, with some references to what was happening concurrently in the nation at large.

    The Havens house dates from 1743. Over the years before the society took possession of it in 1971, it had been a house, a farm, a hospital, and a tavern. In 1986, Havens House was placed on both the State Register of Historic Places and the National Register of Historic Places.

    According to Ms. Lawrenson, the society has benefited from the generosity of local residents who have donated everything from Delft china to letters, photographs, furniture, and other documents. The society not only mounts exhibits but also handles inquiries from residents and scholars.

    The society has embarked on a capital campaign that will include necessary repairs to the house, the construction of a new, larger archival vault to allow for the proper care of the ever-expanding collection of artifacts and documents, and the creation of a study center. Basement space beneath the vault will allow for the storage of furniture and other materials currently filling several upstairs rooms, which will in turn become available as additional exhibition spaces.

    The exhibition will remain on view through March 22. The museum is open Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

    A screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film “Vertigo,” presented by Guild Hall and the Hamptons International Film Festival, drew a full house to the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall in East Hampton on Saturday night.

    Following the screening, the actor Alec Baldwin, who has a house in Amagansett, hosted a brief but equally entertaining forum with David Nugent, the festival’s artistic director.

    As Guild Hall’s website noted, the British film journal Sight & Sound named “Vertigo,” a psychological thriller starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, the best film of all time in 2012, dethroning longtime favorite “Citizen Kane.”

    Mr. Nugent, following the screening, read aloud the Sight & Sound editors’ reasoning. “ ‘It’s the ultimate critics film,’ ” he read. “ ‘It’s a dreamlike film about people who are not sure who they are but are busy reconstructing themselves and each other to fit a kind of cinema ideal about the ideal soul mate.’ ”

    “If you love cinema,” Mr. Nugent said, “it has pretty much everything you want. It’s about as perfectly done as could be.”

    After the screening, Mr. Baldwin invited two members of the audience — provided they were between the ages of 30 and 60 and had seen most of the current Academy Award-nominated films — to serve as “guest film critics.”

    Clearly enjoying himself, Mr. Baldwin riffed on current cinema and its actors and directors. “Tonight you are a critic,” he told his guests, exhorting them to speak freely. “I’m not me, you’re not you, we’re not us,” he instructed. “We’re like film critics: We can say whatever we want to, and ruin people’s careers, hurt their feelings, decimating their careers in the industry. We don’t care.”

    The ad-hoc panel discussed their favorite films of the year, which included “12 Years a Slave” (which Mr. Nugent noted was the closing night film at the 2013 Hamptons International Film Festival), “The Act of Killing,” “American Hustle,” “Nebraska,” “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and “Blue Jasmine.”

    “I hear that’s good,” Mr. Baldwin joked of the latter film, in which he appeared.

    He asked the guests who they felt would win the Academy Award for best actor. “Christian Bale, and if not him [Leonardo] DiCaprio,” one replied. “He got cheated with ‘The Aviator.’ ”

    “I hear that’s good, too,” Mr. Baldwin, who also appeared in that film, deadpanned.

    Mr. Nugent predicted that Matthew McConaughey would be named best actor for “Dallas Buyers Club,” but felt that Chiwetel Ejiofor, who stars in “12 Years a Slave,” was the more deserving actor.

    For his part, Mr. Baldwin said he felt that “12 Years a Slave” was the year’s best film, with which much of the audience and panel concurred. He did part company with the editors of Sight & Sound, however: “Citizen Kane,” he said, remains the greatest film of all time, likening it to a Shakespearian tragedy.

    This year’s Hamptons International Film Festival will take place Oct. 9 to 13, coinciding with Columbus Day weekend.