Arts

    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.

   The Hamptons Theatre Company is holding open auditions for “Other Desert Cities,” a drama by Jon Robin Baitz. The story follows a family gathering at which a controversial memoir threatens to tear the family apart. The auditions will be on Aug. 25 from 2 to 4 p.m., and on Aug. 26 from 6 to 8 p.m., at the Quogue Community Hall on Jessup Avenue.

   The Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival presented a concert called “Captivating Combinations” on July 31 at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, and true to the usual format of this series, each of the four works on the program had a different combination of instruments, offering varying colors, well coupled with the individual character of each composition.

    The program had solid bookends of Beethoven and Ravel, and a poignant Shostakovich trio and less familiar divertimento by the contemporary New York composer John Musto in the middle.

   Great drama is found, most often, not in the lines the actors speak or in the sound and fury they unleash onstage. No, great drama reveals itself in silence, dreaded silence, when those in the audience peer into the souls of the characters onstage and by doing so look truthfully into their own souls, warts and all.

    More than just warts are revealed in Chad Beguelin’s fine new play, “Harbor,” currently playing at 59E59 Theaters in New York.

   The Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor will have a Sunday recital this week by Walter Klauss, and next week by John Walker, both at 3 p.m.. The musicians will use the church’s historic 1844 Erben pipe organ.

   Davina Dobie, an artist who grew up in Kenya, will present a screening of the National Geographic film “Battle for the Elephants” at Guild Hall on Saturday, with cocktails at 6:30 p.m. and the screening at 7. The film examines the plight of the African elephant and its decimation from an estimated 10 million in 1900 to under a half million today.

   The Hamptons International Film Festival’s Summer Docs series will continue on Monday with “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me,” which follows the story of the Broadway legend in a documentary by Chiemi Karasawa. Ms. Stritch, now 87, is shown performing her one-woman cabaret act, torturing Alec Baldwin on “30 Rock,” and speaking about her present and past. (See related story).

    Tickets are $22, $20 for Guild Hall members. More details can be found elsewhere in this section.

    Tomorrow, Guild Hall will hold its Summer Gala in conjunction with the opening of the Chuck Close exhibition at the museum. A cocktail party at the show will be followed by drinks, dinner, and dancing at the Bridgehampton estate of Louise and Leonard Riggio. A live art auction will also be part of the festivities.

    Tickets begin at $500 for the exhibition preview and cocktails, and $1,200 for the entire evening and can be purchased through Guild Hall’s special events department.

“Follow your impulses” was the dogma dished by Simon Doonan during a conversation Sunday in one of the many outdoor gathering nooks at his Shelter Island house on Gardiner’s Bay.

   Sometimes it can be hard to tell when a project or company has reached a tipping point. So often things can appear on the brink of a breakthrough and then fall just short of the last leap.

    This is not the case with Art Intelligence, a relatively recent start-up that takes the best of old school art historical research and marries it to the latest in app technology to create a seamless narrative devoted to some of the more inventive and cross-cultural artists of the past few decades.

   This weekend, Neoteric Fine Art will hold an Amagansett AudioVision festival at its gallery and grounds on Main Street in that hamlet. It will begin Saturday with live music by Thank You Scientist, the Ben Levin Group, and the Montauk Project from 4 to 9 p.m. An exhibition of album cover art and art on vinyl records, “The Vinyl Art Show,” will also be on view then.

    At 10, there will be a “silent disco,” with D.J.s broadcasting music to individual headphone sets during a “laser­mapping” show by Dario Pantosin.

   The Walt Whitman Birthplace Association has named Fran Castan the 2013 Long Island poet of the year. The honor goes to a “nationally known and well-respected poet who champions poetry” through his or her “writing, teaching, and support of the Long Island community of poets,” the association said in a release.

    An induction ceremony, reading, and reception will take place on Sept. 29 at 2 p.m. at the association’s home at 246 Old Walt Whitman Road in Huntington Station.

    “Summer Roses III,” a classical and operatic recital, will be given on Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Southampton Cultural Center. Sarah Moulton Faux, a soprano, and Junko Ohtsu, a violinist, will perform works by Paganini, Mozart, Schubert, Strauss, Puccini, and Donizetti.

    Ms. Ohtsu has been featured as a soloist with orchestras such as the St. Louis Symphony and the Aspen Music Festival Orchestra. Ms. Faux made her operatic debut at the age of 12 with the Opera of the Hamptons. She has also appeared with the New York City Opera and the Pocket Opera of New York.

   The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will continue its summer music series, East End or Busk, tomorrow from 5 to 8 p.m. with the eclectic and electric violinist Lorenzo Laroc. A D.J. will accompany him on the terrace, and food and beverages will be provided by the Art of Eating.

    Admission is included in the $10 museum ticket price.