A 30-year-old actor named Patrick Stewart first came to Broadway via the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in Peter Brook’s triumphant rethinking of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” History has repeated itself 37 years later, with Mr. Stewart again launching from BAM into another Broadway revival of another radical rethinking of the Bard; this time it’s Rupert Goold’s grisly take on “Macbeth,” which reopens April 8 at the Lyceum Theatre.

If tickets are as hard to get as they were at BAM — or even if they aren’t — another safe-bet production of Shakespeare should be Theatre for a New Audience’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” opening April 3. Director Darko Tresnjak did a splendid job with last year’s “Taming of the Shrew,” and this year he has the dependable Laila Robins as Cleo. Or, if you insist on seeing a murderous Thane of Cawdor and are flexible in terms of his size, the accurately named Tiny Ninja Theater is bringing back its puppet production of “Macbeth,” for one night only, on March 31.

Two other productions have transferred to off-Broadway houses from successful runs elsewhere: Ethan Coen’s trio of one-acts, “Almost an Evening,” moves from the Atlantic Theater to the Bleecker Street Theatre (opening April 2), and Jenny Schwartz’s surreal family drama “God’s Ear,” which drew a tastemaker-heavy audience to New Georges last winter, opens at the Vineyard Theatre on April 17.

Much of the hubbub surrounding this year’s Broadway musicals has been devoted to the smaller, scrappier off-Broadway imports, such as “Passing Strange” and “In the Heights,” and “Xanadu,” which might as well be an off-Broadway import. A few big-ticket tuners are still on the way, though. First, Kelli O’Hara and director Bartlett Sher return to Lincoln Center Theater, the site of their “Light in the Piazza” triumph, for the first-ever Broadway revival of “South Pacific” (April 3). And then come two very different film adaptations, each from first-time composers: Cabaret staple John Bucchino has written a new score for the likes of Harvey Fierstein, Tom Wopat, and Faith Prince in the outer-borough period piece “A Catered Affair” (April 17), and John Waters looks to replicate his “Hairspray” success with “Cry-Baby” (April 24), which features a score by Adam Schlesinger of the pop band Fountains of Wayne. But Broadway doesn’t have a monopoly on screen-to-stage adaptations: The long-dormant 29th Street Rep returns with a version of the 1974 paranoid classic “The Conversation” (April 10).

The other big musical originated at City Center’s new Summer Stars program, a spin-off of its Encores! series of semi-staged, semi-obscure musicals. The first Summer Stars production, Patti LuPone’s decades-in-the-making take on “Gypsy,” will open on Broadway (just four years after the last “Gypsy” revival closed) on March 27. That’s the same day Encores! returns with “Juno,” the haunting tale of a troubled family in 1920s Dublin. The Marc Blitzstein musical stars another member of musical theater royalty, Victoria Clark. May 8 will see the season’s third Encores! entry, with Rosie O’Donnell in “No, No, Nanette”; no word yet on this year’s Summer Stars title.

Three of the most influential Americans of the 1960s will be featured in docudramas. Laurence Fishburne plays the Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall in Broadway’s “Thurgood” (April 30), while the Keen Company examines tensions between Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson in “The Conscientious Objector” (through April 19). For a different angle on the turmoil of the era, Joanna Gleason stars as a longjailed radical in Primary Stages’ “Something You Did” (April 1). But the 1960s wasn’t all Sturm und Drang, as two period farces receive revivals: “Boeing-Boeing,” about an architect juggling affairs with three stewardesses, returns to Broadway on May 4, and a domestic comedy gets a Southeast Asian twist in the New Group’s “Rafta, Rafta …” (May 8). Falling somewhere in between is “Jackie Mason — The Ultimate Jew” at New World Stages (through June 29), billed as the final all-new show by the guy who maybe gave Ed Sullivan the finger on live television in 1962.

A handful of up-and-coming playwrights will get perhaps their biggest exposure yet this spring. Manhattan Theatre Club is featuring two of their plays, Itamar Moses’s twisty “The Four of Us” (March 25) and Liz Flahive’s “From Up Here,” the latter marking the stage return of Tony winner Julie White. It opens April 16, followed the next night by Enda Walsh’s pitch-black comedy ” The Walworth Farce,” presented by Ireland’s acclaimed Druid Theatre Company at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.

As for the more established young writers, two of my favorites — Adam Bock and Stephen Adly Guirgis — will premiere new works. Playwrights Horizons has Mr. Bock’s latest, “The Drunken City” (March 26), in which everyone’s drunk, and Mr. Guirgis’s

“The Little Flower of East Orange” (April 6 at the Public) features a famous actress (Ellen Burstyn) in additon to his usual famous director (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Also watch for new pieces by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (Second Stage’s “Good Boys and True,” opening May 19); Paul Rudnick (Lincoln Center Theater’s “The New Century,” opening April 14), and Conor McPherson (the Atlantic’s “Port Authority,” opening May 21).

Literary-minded theatergoers have their pick of two obscurities. First up is the Mint Theater Company’s production of “The Fifth Column” (March 27), a 1937 Spanish Civil War drama by none other than Ernest Hemingway. William Faulkner had even less playwriting experience, but the downtown company Elevator Repair Service has coaxed the first chapter of “The Sound and the Fury” into a theater piece; it opens April 29 at New York Theatre Workshop.

Other established — and more stage-seasoned — authors are enjoying high-profile revivals. Edward Albee will direct his early one-acts “The American Dream” and “The Sandbox” at the Cherry Lane Theatre (April 1), while Clifford Odets’s “The Country Girl” is receiving a Mike Nichols-directed Broadway mounting starring Oscar winners Morgan Freeman and Frances McDormand (April 27). Nearly as starry is the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Christopher Hampton’s “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” (May 1), with Laura Linney and Mamie Gummer joined by British actor Ben Daniels. BAM will house the original cast/co-writers in a return of Athol Fugard’s “Sizwe Bansi Is Dead” (April 9) and the unlikely pairing of John Turturro and Elaine Stritch in Beckett’s “Endgame” (April 30). The biggest news, though, may be MTC’s revival of Caryl Churchill’s 1982 drama “Top Girls” (May 7), with such beloved stage actresses as Marisa Tomei, Martha Plimpton, and Elizabeth Marvel; it is only Ms. Churchill’s second time on Broadway.