Spring Preview

Tulips might not be shooting through the Park Avenue median just yet, but spring has definitely arrived at your local multiplex. Over the next few weeks, comedy, action, romance, major franchises and—of course—comic-book superheroes will, ahem, spring into action on screens all over the city. In other words: wave buh-bye to the sludge that the studios have been spooning on us during the past few months, and say hello to the movies they’re hoping will pay for next year’s Oscar campaign. We’re talking Indy, Carrie and Big, Iron Man and a little Dempsey, all of which will tide us over till Christopher Nolan’s Batman flick, The Dark Knight, cometh in July.

First, though, we have to get through March. There’s the excellent-looking remake of Funny Games on the 14th—which, don’t be fooled, is not funny (it’s about two deeply disturbed men who take a family hostage in their vacation home)—starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Michael Pitt, and directed by Michael Haneke, who did the original, too. We’ve been told on good authority that it will freak us out into the next horizon. Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan continue their comedic reign with Drillbit Taylor on the 21st. In this one, Owen Wilson (don’t call it a comeback!) plays a low-budget bodyguard hired to protect three nerds from a bully at school. Not going out like a lamb, March brings Stop Loss on the 28th. If there’s finally going to be a decent movie about our current troubles in Iraq, our money is on this one. Ryan Philippe stars as a war hero who returns to Texas after his tour of duty, and then is ordered right back to Iraq. Kimberly Pierce resurfaces to direct after a long hiatus (since 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry). (And, for those who care, this is the movie that reportedly helped propel the end of Reese and Ryan thanks to hot blonde Abbie Cornish’s co-starring as the love interest.)

April is not the cruelest month movie-wise. On April 4, everybody’s favorite movie star, George Clooney, directs and stars in Leatherheads. This is a football movie set in the 1920’s (perfect for the screwball-lovin’ Clooney!); Renée Zellweger and her squinty face are also in it; and you know you’re going to go see this one, so don’t even pretend that you’re not. That same weekend also brings The Ruins, a horror movie based on Scott Smith’s best-selling novel that stars broody Jena Malone and should scare off tourists from day-hiking for good (even the trailer is too much for us); and Martin Scorsese’s long-awaited Rolling Stones documentary, Shine a Light.

We don’t know what to make of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wei’s My Blueberry Nights: The film, opening April 11, stars Jude Law, Natalie Portman (doing a Southern accent? Uh-oh) and—hi!—Norah Jones. It looks dreamy, and the IMDB plot synopsis includes the words “soul searching.” O.K.? O.K. The 11th also brings Smart People, which has the seemingly unbeatable cast of Sarah Jessica Parker, Dennis Quaid, Thomas Hayden Church and everyone’s favorite Juno sassy-pants, Ellen Page. We’re a sucker for any movie that puts the fun back in family dysfunction, so consider us there. On the other end of the spectrum is Street Kings, which stars Keanu “pop quiz, hotshot” Reeves as an LAPD cop who has to fight the department after evidence implicates him in a crime. And … most excitingly? Hugh Laurie, released from House’s Princeton Plainsboro Hospital, plays someone without a limp. Meanwhile, Meryl Streep, Aidan Quinn and Liu Ye star in what looks to be a terribly disturbing based-on-a-true-story movie, Dark Matter, the first feature film by opera director Chen Shi-Zheng. It’s about a young scientist on the quest for the Nobel Prize, and it won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.

On April 18, Al Pacino stars in 88 Minutes, about a womanizing forensic psychologist working with the F.B.I., who may have tussled with the wrong serial killer. (Tag line: “He has 88 minutes to solve a murder. His own.” All together—hoo-haah!) OC cutie Benjamin McKenzie shows up, as do Leelee Sobieski, Alicia Witt and Amy Brenneman. Same weekend, different subject matter, is Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Here we have Jason Segel (another fine and thriving member of team Apatow) as a man jilted by his girlfriend (Kristin Bell) and looking for love in Hawaii … where his ex also is vacationing.

Tina Fey is another taking-over-Hollywood type, and the movie she stars in, April 25’s Baby Mama, looks to be a surefire winner. Written and directed by Michael McCullers (of Saturday Night Live and Austin Powers), Ms. Fey stars as a successful city-living working-gal who is determined to have a baby on her own. But when she finds out she can’t, she picks a woman to be her surrogate: a down-on-her-luck type played by Amy Poheler. Sometimes a movie manages to hit at just the right time … some go the way of Children of Men, and others go here. Looks hilarious and also stars Greg Kinnear and Sigourney Weaver. Its major competition almost doesn’t need any explanation … we’re talking about Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay. We kind of love that Kal Penn is sticking with what made him famous after turns in The Namesake and his current role on House. This time, the pot-smoking pair try to outrun The Man, who suspects them of being terrorists.

Hey, May! This is when the really big guns (literally) start to come out. May 2 brings Iron Man, where classic comic hero Tony Stark is “forced to create a life-support suit to keep him alive.” He does it, and then uses it to fight crime. The big news on this one is the cast: the scarily talented Robert Downey Jr. plays Stark; Gwyneth Paltrow (remember her?) is Virginia ‘Pepper’ Potts; and Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges and Samuel L. Jackson all have supporting roles. Expect greatness. Competing with the comic-nerd flick is Made of Honor. And man, this has been a movie we’ve been looking forward to since previews started popping up ages ago. Patrick “McDreamy” Dempsey returns to his Can’t Buy Me Love roots as a man in love with an engaged woman who asks him to be her maid of honor. Oh, the hijinks … they will ensue! The following weekend brings another highly anticipated one, Speed Racer. This is from those wacky Wachowski brothers, and from the looks of it, the colors and action sequences will hold up for all those fanboy Matrix geeks. Emile Hirsch is behind the wheel. (Is he the next Leonardo DiCaprio?) And then, look out, because it’s time on May 16 for The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. We can only hope that Oscar winner Tilda Swinton, playing the White Witch, is as over the top and deliciously campy as she was in the first installment. And finally, grasping for those big Memorial Day bucks, comes a little something for the chicks and the, um, guys. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull brings us Indy and—hey!—Karen Allen returns (yea!) while Shia LeBeouf continues his quest for superstardom.

And—how could we forget?—there’s Sex and the City: The Movie on May 30, which will make no less than a gazillion dollars. Don’t feel guilty—we’re going to see it, too.

Parisian-born sculptor Louise Bourgeois’ life and career have been remarkable. Born in 1911, four years after Picasso painted Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, Bourgeois came of age during a time when “avant-garde” had yet to become the empty boast of PR men. Influenced by the murkier tangents of Surrealism, Ms. Bourgeois, who studied at the École du Louvre and was Fernand Léger’s assistant before coming to the United States in 1938, pursues a fetishistic form of sculpture that touches upon childhood fantasy and bodily decrepitude. A couple of Ms. Bourgeois’ towering bronze spiders are sure to scurry up the ramp during her retrospective at the Guggenheim. (June 27-Sept. 28)

New Yorkers can look forward to a double dose of retro-Pop and unapologetic capitalism. Takashi Murakami, whose paintings and sculptures will be at the Brooklyn Museum in “© Murakami,” is a proud exponent of corporate art: His sickly sweet variations on anime and manga are factory-made commodities produced on a scale Andy Warhol couldn’t have imagined. (April 5-July 13)

Then there’s the redoubtable Jeff Koons, whose sculptures will be on the Met’s rooftop garden. Mr. Koons will likely offer unctuous monuments to kitsch culture. They’ll have to contend with sweeping views of Central Park. Wonder what museum visitors will spend most of their time looking at. (April 29-Oct. 26)

“Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy,” another show at the Met, will explore how superheroes are “the ultimate metaphor for fashion and its ability to transform the human body.” The exhibition will center on superhero costumes and how they intersect with haute couture and sportswear. (May 7-Sept. 1)

Should your therapist not provide enough insight, pseudo-shaman Bert Gordon might pick up the slack. Register now for sessions with Mr. Gordon—held in a Minimalist white cube, no less—where he’ll record your confessions and then “discreetly” broadcast them. Mr. Gordon is one of around 80 artists included in the perpetually maligned Whitney Biennial. (March 6-June 1)

Further uptown, the Studio Museum in Harlem is mounting a retrospective of paintings by Charles Ethan Porter (c. 1847-1923). A proponent of luminism and student of the Barbizon school, Porter was esteemed by peers for his still lifes, landscapes and portraits. How 19th-century paintings will relate—or clash—with the “global perspective” offered by “Flow,” a concurrent overview of contemporary African art, will be interesting and maybe instructive. (April 2-June 29)

MoMA is touting “Geometry of Motion 1920s/1970s” as an exercise in “the social potential of visual agency.” How this will be borne out by an exhibition dedicated to, among others, Dadaist godhead Marcel Duchamp and Robert Smithson is an open question. Something about static images and light projections. Let’s hope the exhibition lives down its highfalutin publicity (March 19-June 23)

After his much-talked-about exhibition at the Venice Biennale, abstract painter Thomas Nozkowski has become the least-best-kept secret in the art world. Long esteemed by fellow painters, Mr. Nozkowski’s enigmatic amalgamations of biomorphic blips, geometric structures and occluded biographical oddments won’t stay below the radar for long now that powerhouse gallery Pace-Wildenstein represents him. (April 4-May 3)

R. B. Kitaj, best known as an American expatriate living in London, was an undeniably virtuosic draftsman and an aggravatingly erratic painter. Both are likely to be on view in an exhibition at Marlborough Gallery, the first since the artist’s death last year at the age of 75. Kitaj melded memory, Pop, history and culture both high and low into brightly colored, slapdash, sometimes spectacular and always combative narratives. (April 10-May 3)

Helen Miranda Wilson’s turnabout from meticulously articulated realist to meticulously articulated abstractionist has been altogether happy. Employing geometric scaffolding for meditative ends, Ms. Wilson is a miniaturist whose paintings bear close scrutiny: There isn’t a pat of paint that she hasn’t invested with diligence and love. Ms. Wilson’s recent paintings at DC Moore will likely elaborate on her sumptuous surfaces, luminous palette and softly stated rhythms. (March 26-April 26)

With as many musical genres competing for your attention as there are iPods currently plugged into ears, there’s a huge demand today for aurally inclined curators. What regular person has time to sort through everything? We need people who know the scene, who have the taste, who can lead us through the confusion of sound streams and podcasts, to bring together all that glorious information into something meaningful. Luckily for classical fans, they’re easy to find if you know where to look.

At the third annual Keys to the Future series for solo piano at Greenwich House’s Renee Weiler Concert Hall, series curator Joseph Rubenstein has arranged a short, sweet program—three recitals on three consecutive nights, each an hour long and together promising a sweeping survey of contemporary styles. Mr. Rubenstein has matched eight performers (himself included) with pieces by 23 contemporary composers ranging from John Adams to Chick Corea (March 25, 26, 27)

Musical curator Ronen Givony’s Wordless Music series hosted Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s Popcorn Superhet Receiver to much ado at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in January. On May 2, the Wordless Music season continues with a triple bill headed by composing duo Stars of the Lid, performing with a string quartet. They’ll share the evening with fellow ambient minimalists itsnotyouitsme. (Love the names.) The night includes a performance by Face the Music, the contemporary music orchestra comprised of 10-to-15-year-old students from Manhattan’s Special Music School that performed in January at the opening of the newly renovated Merkin Concert Hall. Check out their MySpace page. These kids are fierce.

On March 13 and 14, guitarist Bryce Dessner of the National and percussionist Glenn Kotche of Wilco share a bill at the Kitchen, with video projections by artist Matthew Ritchie. Mr. Dessner, trained as a classical guitarist at Yale, will debut compositions for guitar and string quartet; Mr. Kotche will play works from his most recent solo album, Mobile, and adapt parts of his Anomaly, originally composed for the Kronos Quartet. Kronos themselves are on tour, but there’s another quartet to check out uptown at Symphony Space. On March 20, Ethel will host the second annual Ethel Fair, featuring the group in performance with Gutbucket (sounds like: Laurie Anderson vs. Primus, steel-cage match) and Kentucky bluegrass legend Dean Osborne. And fresh from his Feb. 29 performance at the Whitney Museum, composer and inventor Tristan Perich, who last year released 1-Bit Music—a listening device shaped like a CD jewel case that produced half-composed patterns of sound—will premiere on March 1 his I am not without my eyes open for string orchestra and organ, as part of the String Orchestra of Brooklyn’s Program of String Works by Young American Composers. The evening will also include premieres of Ian Hartsough’s Stick Figures and Gabriel Lubell’s Quomodo sedet sola. And don’t miss the venerable Bang on a Can Marathon at the World Financial Center Winter Garden—a full weekend of round-the-clock, nonstop live music. (May 31-June 2)

Composer, pianist and conductor Thomas Adès offers a tour through his own rapidly expanding body of composition and performance as part of Zankel Hall’s Making Music series. On March 29, Mr. Adès will conduct, perform and discuss works from throughout his career, and the soprano who premiered Adès’ seminal Five Eliot Landscapes in 1990 will be on hand to again perform the piece. This will come on the heels of Ades’ Carnegie Hall conducting debut the night before, where he’ll lead the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in the New York premiere of Gerald Barry’s opera, The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit. Mr. Barry, a protégé of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel, says the work “revolves around questions of aging, vanity, illusion, fear, wit, ecstasy, regret and yearning.” He’ll elaborate further in a pre-performance discussion with Jeremy Geffen, Carnegie Hall’s director of artistic planning.

And since Wagner’s Ring Cycle is a world in itself, you’ll appreciate ending the season at Carnegie Hall, where Lorin Maazel will escort you safely through the German composer’s vast musical labyrinth in The Ring Without Words: Orchestral Highlights from the Ring Cycle. The New York Philharmonic will perform Maazel’s arrangement of music from the epic. (June 11)

But if you’re not in the mood to leave the house, just turn on WNYC’s Evening Music, airing Monday through Thursday, 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. Terrance McKnight takes over weeknight hosting duties (David Garland will stay on to host the weekend broadcasts). There’s a lot goin’ on at WNYC these days, and Mr. McKnight, touted recently in The New York Times as a charismatic guide for the musically perplexed, doesn’t plan on letting you eat your dinner in peace. “We refuse to be background music!” said Limor Tomer, WNYC’s executive producer for music, to The Observer. We’re inclined to believe her—Mr. McKnight hosted a public radio show in Atlanta for years that earned him a reputation as a relentless musical omnivore, mixing jazz with classical with pop till they all just sounded like … music.

Would you be surprised to hear that a surging tide of books about politics is about to engulf us?

Later this month we’ll get a chance to peruse War and Decision, by Douglas Feith (HarperCollins, March 25). Mr. Feith, a neocon promoter of the Iraq War, was famously identified by Gen. Tommy Franks as “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet.” It’s unlikely that Mr. Feith will have reached the same conclusions about Iraq as Peter Galbraith, whose Unintended Consequences (Simon & Schuster, June 17) surveys the disastrous American intervention. Can a book that probes an open wound be “eagerly awaited”? This one is: Standard Operating Procedure, by Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch and filmmaker Errol Morris (the Penguin Press, May 15), takes a long close look at Abu Ghraib.

On the home front, the emphasis is on postmortem: Veteran reporter Eric Lichtblau examines one facet of the Bush legacy in Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice (Pantheon, April 1); Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas? (2004), pans across the whole desolate landscape in The Wrecking Crew: Conservative Rule in Theory and Practice (Metropolitan, Aug. 5). For an utterly unbiased account, see Arianna Huffington’s Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution and Made Us All Less Safe (Knopf, April 29).

If you’re looking for more inside skinny on our lame-duck president (complete with juicy, unattributed quotations), you’ll have to wait until July, when Simon & Schuster will publish the fourth and presumably final volume—as yet untitled—of the protean Bob Woodward’s evolving evaluation of the Decider in Chief.

Need a dose of inspiration to counteract the bleak reality of 2000-2008? Try Moyers on Democracy, by Bill Moyers (Broadway, May 6) or Know Your Power: A Message to America’s Daughters by Nancy Pelosi (Doubleday, July 29).

Or maybe what we really need is a good laugh. The very clever Jim Holt obliges with Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes (Norton, 7/14), which promises to be both erudite and plain old funny.

FANS OF THE short story, rejoice! The season is packed with collections from masters of the art: Tobias Wolff’s Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (Knopf, March 25); Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (Knopf, April 1); Cynthia Ozick’s Dictation: A Quartet (Houghton Mifflin, April 16); and—if you can wait until the end of the summer for a little of that Brokeback Mountain magic—Annie Proulx’s Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 (Scribner, Sept. 9).

Lavish advance praise has been heaped on The Hakawati, by Lebanese painter and author Rabih Alameddine (Knopf, April 22); one of the ecstatic blurbists (“pure genius”) is Aleksandar Hemon, whose own novel, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead, May 1), has also been blessed with excellent early reviews. Much hyped and destined to disappoint, Keith Gessen’s debut, All the Sad Young Literary Men (Viking, April 10), is about three struggling writers, a topic the founder of n+1 should know inside out. And guess what? One of the writers is named Keith!

Another debut: Isabel Fonseca, second wife of Martin Amis, has written Attachment (Knopf, April 29), a novel about a woman whose cozy life is disrupted by a racy love letter addressed to her husband. Meanwhile, Mr. Amis himself has collected his writings—essays and stories, too—about militant Islam in The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom (Knopf, April 1). (The verdict in Britain: “wilfully ignorant … disturbingly bigoted.”)

Two memoirs from opposite ends of the entertainment industry: The ultimate establishment insider, Barbara Walters, gives us Audition: A Memoir (Knopf, May 6); and Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s hippie girlfriend, the one leaning into him on the album cover, gives us A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (Random House, May 13).

While we’re remembering the 60’s, brace yourself for a return visit with another unpopular president mired in an unpopular war: Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, by Rick Perlstein (Scribner, May 13). Scroll back past L.B.J., and here’s J.F.K.’s right-hand man, Ted Sorensen, with his White House memoir, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History (HarperCollins, May 6).

CAN WE RELAX now? Here are four titles about the ways in which we amuse ourselves, all of them appropriately entertaining: Death by Leisure: A Cautionary Tale, by Chris Ayres (Atlantic Monthly Press, sometime in July); Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, by Mary Roach (Norton, April 7); Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, by Kingsley Amis (Bloomsbury, May 13); and How Fiction Works, by the brilliant James Wood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 22).

As late winter’s doldrums penetrate the city, it’s becoming harder to find a reason to leave the house at night. But what if we told you Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were headlining the Plug Independent Music Awards tomorrow at Terminal 5? And then what if we told you it was only $10? Well, the bad news is the show sold out in about two seconds. But those of you who scored tickets will get to see the legendary Australian creep-rockers unveil songs from their 14th studio album, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, out in the U.S. on April 8.

Mr. Cave is not the only former singer of an iconic ’80s band to enter the spotlight this spring. Morrissey has a new greatest-hits collection due out in the U.S. on March 25, and while it may seem like the British crooner’s best-of compilations have gotten a bit redundant, this one comes with a special, shall we say, bonus feature: a photograph of the Mozzer’s naked behind (no joke!) bearing the phrase “Your Arse An’ All.” Racy! Fellow Englishman Billy Bragg (who’s been known to cover a Smiths song or two) will see the U.S. release of his latest album, Mr. Love and Justice, the same day as Mr. Cave’s.

But enough about the British. America’s had its fair share of classic indie bands, too, and one of them, R.E.M., was on the Lower East Side recently shooting a video for the first single from Accelerate (April 1). Comeback much? Speaking of the LES, Moby will release Last Night, his sixth studio album, also on April Fools Day. And as if the air of mid-’90s throwbacks couldn’t get any thicker, here come the Breeders with Mountain Battles (April 8—we’re sensing a theme here), their first album since 2002. Yes, that is the Alternative Nation theme song you hear in the background.

This just in from the kids’ table: Noisy Nashville punkers Be Your Own Pet, who have garnered a lot of cred considering they’re still under the legal drinking age (not every adolescent garage band gets to tour with Sonic Youth!), will release their second full-length, Get Awkward, on March 18. On the emo side, Fall Out Boy protégés Panic! at the Disco will release Pretty. Odd. on March 25, one week after their less famous label mates the Hush Sound release Goodbye Blues. Considerably older, but no less sappy, the good guys of Death Cab for Cutie release Narrow Stairs on May 13 … just in time for the prom!

In hip-hop news, Fat Joe’s new album, The Elephant in the Room, hits stores on March 11. Maths + English, by U.K. grime rapper Dizzee Rascal, drops stateside on April 29, the same day as the Roots’ 10th album, Rising Down. And a new album from the foul-mouthed Missy Elliot is slated for late spring. Even more massive will be Gnarls Barkley’s second soul-drenched full-length, The Odd Couple, out on April 8. Two words: summer jam!

That brings us to the contemporary indie rock portion of our tour. On March 18, New Pornographers member Dan Bejar releases Trouble in Dreams, his ninth album under the moniker Destroyer. Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy finally gets a proper solo album, Colin Meloy Sings Live! (April 8), which documents the bookish singer’s 2006 tour. Dancey London duo the Kills (whose singer, Allison Mosshart, you probably don’t remember from her past life as the crusty frontwoman of the late-90’s Florida pop-punk band Discount) will release Midnight Boom on March 18. And just in case any car companies are looking for a catchy song to put in one of their commercials this spring, Spoon’s new EP, Don’t You Evah, comes out on April 8.

Madonna just directed a movie starring Eugene Hutz, the singer from Gogol Bordello. (Is that weirder than Johnny Marr being in Modest Mouse?) But when she’s not busy trying to be an indie filmstress, Madge can be found working with producers Timbaland, Nate “Danja” Hills and Pharrell Williams on her 11th studio album (April 29), which is yet to be named, but does feature the requisite Justin Timberlake collaboration.

And now, it’s time for the spring release we’ve all been waiting for, the one that we’d be damned if we didn’t see at the top of Pitchfork’s 2008 year-end list. Yes … the debut Scarlett Johansson album! Capping off the season with a May 20 street date, ScarJo’s Anywhere I Lay My Head has it all: Tom Waits covers, Nick Zinner (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) guitar work, guest vocals from David Bowie. Might we be pleasantly surprised with this one? It kills us to say it, but anything’s possible when Bowie’s involved.

The writers’ strike might be over, but we can still feel the afttershocks—just look at what’s gonna be on the tube this spring (i.e., not much). Sure, Lost (ABC, Thursday, 9 p.m.) returned a few weeks back, but it’s still a truncated season (13 episodes instead of 16, boo!). And How I Met Your Mother, the best underwatched sitcom on television (don’t you need more Neil Patrick Harris in your life?), returns on Monday, March 17 (CBS, 8:30). But as for new offerings. Well … you decide.

The Observer has been known to wallow in TV sleaze now and again, but even we somehow overlooked the fact that there’s actually a show dedicated to finding “talented” girls who excel at quasi-stripping at meathead bars. But there you have it: Named for the famed East Village joint, The Ultimate Coyote Ugly Search returns for a third season on CMT. Ten ladies compete to join a troupe departing N.Y.C. to tour “the country singing and dancing on bar tops and impressing crowds.” Hmm. Will this make us feel superior, or fat? We might avoid finding out.

Speaking of fat … the Learning Channel (best known for their pretty good show Little People, Big World, about a couple with dwarfism and their crazy, hyper-athletic kids) debuts I Can Make You Thin (March 7, 10 p.m.). Starring British self-help guru Paul McKenna, the show will be ‘interactive’ and will ‘transform your relationship with food,’ according to Time Warner Cable. Actually, we like our relationship to food just fine, especially when Padma Lakshmi is telling us about pork belly on Top Chef, Bravo’s monster reality hit, which returns on March 12. For the fourth season, the game’s in Chicago, but about half the contestants are from N.Y.C. However, one of them, Spike, points out in his online bio on the Bravo site that he’s from “Williamsburg, NY.” Hipster much? We know who we won’t be rooting for!

Don’t worry. There are a few new scripted shows that might well be worth your viewing. Fox premieres Canterbury’s Law on March 10 at 10 p.m., a new legal drama about renegade defense attorney Elizabeth Canterbury (played by new mommy Julianna Margulies), who’ll bend the rules to do right by folks wrongly accused of crimes. And, of course, her intense focus on work also complicates her personal life. Best part? Aidan Quinn, of whom we don’t see enough these days, co-stars as Canterbury’s husband.

On March 14, Fox will also premiere The Return of Jezebel James, a new sitcom from Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino. Parker Posey has her prime-time debut as Sarah Tompkins, a successful children’s book editor and writer (her teen novel alter ego is the titular Jezebel) who, due to a medical condition, can’t get pregnant. But she wants a baby, so she asks her sister Coco (Lauren Ambrose) to carry it for her. The combination of these two, plus Dianne Wiest (as their mother) and Scott Cohen (a.k.a. Max Medina from Gilmore Girls) has us clicking feverishly on the DVR. The pilot we saw a year ago was iffy, but we’re crossing our fingers this one has come together.

Samantha Who? isn’t exactly new—nine episodes aired from October to December of last year—but it’s probably new to you. The ABC comedy, which returns on April 7 to complete its first season, deserves a bigger audience than it’s been pulling. The premise is goofy: Samantha (Christina Applegate of Married With Children fame) plays a mid-30’s career gal who just happens to be recovering from a nasty case of amnesia. As she pieces her life together, she realizes that she wasn’t such a nice person before she lost her memory, and sets out to right some of her many wrongs. Barry Watson (big bro from 7th Heaven) co-stars as the good-guy ex-boyfriend who can’t help but help Samantha navigate her new reality. This show is cute, funny and downright good-natured. And what’s wrong with that?

We don’t usually go for comedy for comedy’s sake, but Comedy Central’s got Lewis Black doing a fake courtroom thing with the new show Lewis Black’s the Root of All Evil (March 12, 10:30). The show will have “Judge” Black presiding over imaginary cases (i.e., Paris Hilton v. Dick Cheney) argued by a rotating roster of comedians. Over on Showtime, comedienne Tracey Ullman stages a comeback with State of the Union (March 30, 10 p.m.), doing her best impersonations of American pop cultural and political figures, as well as an array of American characters. Given the election year, this just might be perfect comic timing.

On March 4, Mary-Louise Parker was sipping up some lobster bisque in a New York cafe when the man sitting in the seat next to her dropped dead. Or, shall we say, slumped dead at his table. His cell phone started to ring. Ms. Parker, playing a shy, retiring museum worker on the opening night of Sarah Ruhl’s oddball comedy at Playwrights Horizons, kicked off the spring theater season by answering that Dead Man’s Cell Phone. Ms. Parker, the hottie mom on Showtime’s Weeds, stars as Jean, who unwittingly becomes comforter and confessor to a stranger’s grieving friends and family. (Playwrights Horizon Mainstage)

The Golden Globe winner is just one of the stars of the big and small screens who will join resident New York stage actors this spring in a theater season ripe with old-timey musical revivals and edgier newcomers.

In the Heights, a Latin and hip-hop musical (we’re envisioning an amalgam of those Step Up dance movies and West Side Story), has already garnered Broadway buzz in previews. Lin-Manuel Miranda, 28, a Washington Heights native, created and composed the musical about outsiders and young love when he was a Wesleyan University student. With its young, bright-eyed cast and crew (the book writer, Quiara Alegría Hudes, is 29, and the director, Thomas Kail, just turned 30), In the Heights is sure to bring a much-needed under-40 crowd to the theater. (March 9, Richard Rodgers Theater)

Conversations in Tusculum at the Public brings a leading-man triple threat: Brian Dennehy, who has won two best-lead-actor Tony awards; Aidan Quinn, the dreamy Irish actor who we’ll always see as Dez from Desperately Seeking Susan, and David Strathairn, a Pinter stage veteran who channeled Edward R. Murrow for his Oscar-nominated role in 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck. They’ll play leads in Richard Nelson’s new historical play about a small town outside Rome during Julius Caesar’s era. They’ll ask themselves: When a misguided and manipulative leader endangers his own country, should citizens bury their heads in the sand or take action? Hmmm … sounds relevant! (March 11, the Public Theater)

Get ready for “Some Enchanted Evening,” because Light in the Piazza’s Bartlett Sher will bring Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific back to Broadway for the first time in almost 60 years. Two-time Tony nom Kelli O’Hara will play World War II Navy nurse Nellie Forbush, who falls in love with a middle-aged French plantation mogul, Emile de Becque, played by Brazilian opera singer Paulo Szot. (April 3, Vivian Beaumont Theater at the Lincoln Center)

Stephen Sondheim’s Gypsy will get its Broadway run this year, with director (and book writer) Arthur Laurents returning to helm the production (last year’s Encores! City Center production received great reviews). Patti LuPone will also reprise her role as Mamma Rose, “the ultimate show business mother,” to sultry striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee. Laura Benanti (who can be spotted in the new ABC comedy Eli Stone) will play Gypsy, and Boyd Gaines will play the agent, Herbie. (March 27, St. James Theater)

John Waters’ 90’s cult classic Cry-Baby will makes its way from the La Jolla Playhouse in California to the Marquis Theater stage this spring. James Snyder, playing a blond version of Johnny Depp’s bad-boy Wade Walker, will get a little crush on square Allison (played by Elizabeth Stanley) while the rest of 1950’s Baltimore sings and dances their dissent. Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, the fellas who penned the last Waters musical, Hairspray, wrote the book for the musical. Mr. Waters himself receives a “creative consultant” credit for the production, so we have high hopes! (April 24, Marquis Theater)

In more star-studded productions, don’t miss powerhouse Frances McDormand playing Georgie Elgin, a lovable lady whose long years of devotion to her actor husband, Frank (played by Morgan Freeman), have almost obliterated her own personality, in the Clifford Odets play The Country Girl. (April 27, Bernard B. Jacobs Theater)

Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis and director Philip Seymour Hoffman coaxed Ellen Burstyn to the stage for The Little Flower of East Orange, a ghost story set in a Manhattan charity hospital. (April 6, Public Theater)

Speaking of Mr. Hoffman, his lovely co-star in The Savages, Laura Linney, will star with Brit Ben Daniels as friends with benefits in a new production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, directed by Rufus Norris. Can’t wait to see those cuties get feisty. Talk about spring fever … we’re burning up! (May 1, American Airlines Theater)