The faux-naive ethos of the era found perhaps its most enduring stage ambassador in 1971 with Stephen Schwartz’s pop-pastiche pageant “Godspell,” which ran for most of the decade. A Broadway revival has been tentatively slated for August. That makes it the first major revival of Mr. Schwartz’s work since he wowed a new generation of youngsters with “Wicked,” which had its premiere in 2003. Also due in August is “Hair,” a show that had an even larger impact on the musical-theater landscape when it opened in 1967. Central Park’s Delacorte Theatre sponsored a buzz-heavy staging of the musical last summer and has invited it back for a full-fledged mounting, with much of the same cast.

“Hair” will be the second of this year’s Shakespeare in the Park stagings, following a far more conventional Delacorte production — “Hamlet” (June 17), which hasn’t been seen in the Delacorte since 1975, and will offer Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis at the helm. It features an abundance of rock-solid Shakespeare in the Park veterans, including last summer’s Juliet, Lauren Ambrose; a memorable Henry V, Andre Braugher, and the man who played Hamlet in that 1975 production, Sam Waterston. He’s passing the torch along to the superb Michael Stuhlbarg (“The Pillowman”), whose Andrew Aguecheek in 2002’s “Twelfth Night” was one of the funniest Shakespearean performances I’ve ever seen. Much of the theatrical ferment of the 1960s and ’70s stemmed from the pioneering work of the Negro Ensemble Company. The Signature Theatre, in a rare departure from devoting its season to one playwright, is giving 2008-09 over to rarely performed NEC productions. First up is Leslie Lee’s 1976 family drama “The First Breeze of Summer,” which Ruben Santiago-Hudson will direct in August. Like “First Breeze,” Ntozake Shange’s 1974 play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” also transferred to Broadway after an acclaimed off-Broadway run. A Broadway revival of Ms. Shange’s play is scheduled to open August 2 at a still-unannounced theater, featuring neo-soul chanteuse India.Arie.

A certain dose of ’70s-era hedonism is pretty much a given when Alan Cumming is onstage, and the bratty Scot has been ideally cast as Dionysus in the National Theatre of Scotland’s new adaptation of “The Bacchae” at the Lincoln Center Festival (July 3). The festival is considerably smaller than in previous years, but theater is still well represented: Even brighter star wattage is coming from Dublin’s Gate Theatre, as Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson join Barry McGovern in a trio of unconventional Samuel Beckett pieces. Mr. Neeson will star in “Eh Joe,” which Mikhail Baryshnikov tackled in last year’s “Beckett Shorts,” while Messrs. Fiennes and McGovern take on “First Love” and “I’ll Go On,” respectively. The three plays open on staggered schedules in mid-July, followed by a pair of marathon performances.

The film-theater confluence in “Eh Joe” is nothing compared to what Williamsburg’s Brick Theater has planned — a four-week festival devoted to exploring the interrelationship between the two media, starting May 30. The Film Festival: A Theater Festival will feature everything from a staging of Orson Welles’s lost opus “The Magnificent Ambersons” to a short film chronicling the audiences who streamed out early from Richard Maxwell’s pilloried Brooklyn Academy of Music staging of “Henry IV, Part I” in 2003. And festivalgoers with a broader scope will have hundreds of options in August, when the 12th annual New York International Fringe Festival fans out all over the Village and below; details will be announced in June.

Shakespeare buffs needn’t gripe about a bunch of hippies taking over the Delacorte for the second half of this summer. For an altogether different outdoor dose of the Bard, St. Ann’s Warehouse is presenting what promises to be a mind-blowing production of “Macbeth” by the daring Polish company TR Warszawa at the roofless Tobacco Warehouse, across the street from its usual DUMBO venue. The Polish-language production runs between June 17 and June 29.

Regardless of the season, some of New York’s more prolific playwrights can be counted on for a new work (or two). Adam Rapp is inexplicably absent this summer, but new plays by Neil LaBute (MCC’s “Reasons To Be Pretty,” opening June 2), Conor McPherson (“Port Authority” at the Atlantic, featuring “Spring Awakening” Tony winner John Gallagher Jr. and opening May 21), A.R. Gurney (“Buffalo Gal,” opening at Primary Stages in August), and the recently rejuvenated Edward Albee (the Louise Nevelson profile “Occupant,” opening June 5 at the Signature with Mercedes Ruehl) should more than compensate. Mr. LaBute also has a shorter piece in Ensemble Studio Theatre’s latest marathon of one-act plays; joining him through June 28 are the author of “Proof,” David Auburn; a “Daily Show” regular, Lewis Black, and the Village Voice theater critic, Michael Feingold.

The musical landscape isn’t confined to revivals. Michael Friedman, whose witty, genre-hopping songs have been an integral part of Civilians and Les Freres Corbusier productions, comes uptown with an adaptation of the film “Saved!” for Playwrights Horizons (June 3). The feminist hip-hop opera “BASH’d!,” a hit at last year’s Fringe Festival, will set up shop at the Zipper Factory on June 23, and the mega-meta-musical “title of show” makes its long-discussed move to Broadway on July 17.

Also coming to Broadway is “Cirque Dreams Jungle Fantasy” (early July); the title notwithstanding, this jungle-themed acrobatic spectacle is not a Cirque du Soleil production. If you prefer your performers on the ground, Victoria Clark and John Glover star in the Roundabout’s revival of Christopher Durang’s dark comedy “The Marriage of Bette and Boo” (July 10), while Second Stage offers a revival of Richard Nelson’s considerably lighter comedy “Some Americans Abroad” (July).

And while shows such as “Hair,” “Godspell,” and “For Colored Girls … ” were raising consciousnesses in the early ’70s, Sam Shepard was raising hell with the likes of Patti Smith in “Cowboy Mouth” and other Western Gothic head trips. Mr. Shepard has returned to the Public with “Kicking a Dead Horse” (July 14), a one-man show for Stephen Rea that reportedly acknowledges as well as mocks the cowpoke-mystic image that Mr. Shepard created during that time.