Jeremy Gerard

A still, black pool surrounds the vibrant revival of “The Glass Menagerie” that opened last night on Broadway.

Swaggering Romeo toodles in on a custom-built motorcycle, wearing red leather boots; girlish Juliet soars on a schoolyard swing.

Like a classic thriller, Ethan Coen’s “Women or Nothing” begins with questions.

Cassius Clay had recently converted to Islam, re-emerged as Muhammad Ali and was preparing for his 1965 heavyweight title rematch with Sonny Liston when he introduced the press to his “secret strategist,” movie star Lincoln Perry.

All 55,000 square feet of the Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall are focused on a table not much bigger than the chess board atop it.

The famous folks frequenting the Vienna cafe in 1910 reads like the Who’s Who of a Tom Stoppard play: Gustav Mahler and his wife, Alma; young Ludwig Wittgenstein; younger Josef Stalin and, doling out sage advice, homburg-topped, cigar-smoking Sigmund Freud.

You’ve seen the splashy ads featuring names like Daniel Craig, Mary-Louise Parker and “Big Fish.” Now it’s time to check out the musicals, comedies and dramas vying for your attention and cash this fall. Here’s my selection of the most enticing.

It’s the swans as much as the Shakespeare that has me driving each summer 90 minutes west of Toronto to the middle of nowhere.

The magisterial Moor bellows with a Caribbean lilt and poor doomed Desdemona chirps like a wounded starling in the Stratford Festival’s stylish, well-spoken rendition of “Othello.”

A cheerfully cheesy banner above the stage of the Delacorte Theater sets the tone for the Public Theater’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost.”

A Jeddah criminal court judge has sentenced Saudi Arabian journalist Raif Badawi to seven years in prison and 600 lashes for the crime of “insulting Islam.”

The corn really is high as an elephant’s eye in Marsha Norman and Jason Robert Brown’s rich, ballad-packed new musical, “The Bridges of Madison County.”