Welcome back to The Big To-Do, and happy spring! The vernal equinox happened at 10:46 a.m., and the new (astronomical) season means a lot more daylight as well as a story that mentions “native skunk cabbage.” For college sports fans, it’s one of the most wonderful times of the year — opening weekend of the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments, plus a blizzard of hockey tournament action. And for baseball fans, Red Sox opening day in Cincinnati is less than a week away. Now, that’s a sign of spring!

Not feeling sporty? “Wicked: For Good” is the highest-profile option on an appealing list of streaming picks from the Globe’s Matt Juul. This week’s installment of the Globe’s new series One Special Thing finds inspiration at the Harvard Art Museums. And the arts brief section The Rundown includes Noah Kahan news about film as well as music.

Finally, the Globe Living Arts staff has big plans: boning up for Boston movie, TV, and pop culture trivia at Aeronaut Brewing Company in Somerville. Test your knowledge Monday at 8 p.m.

Movies

“Project Hail Mary,” starring Ryan Gosling as a science teacher turned space traveler, earns 4 stars from Globe film critic Odie Henderson. The adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel “unfolds like a very satisfying beach read, leisurely pacing itself as our protagonist figures out what on Earth — or rather, off Earth — is happening to him.” It “plays like a movie from an era when filmmakers trusted our intelligence and our attention spans.”

Tony Benna’s documentary “André Is an Idiot”​ is “a cautionary tale, but it’s also a celebration of a life filled with crazy stories and lots of love.” André Riccardi directed the insult at himself after being diagnosed with terminal cancer that a colonoscopy might have identified. The film “paints the portrait of a man so full of verve and humor that you secretly hope there’s a happy ending,” Henderson writes in a 3½-star review.

“Bugsy Malone,” which turns 50 this year, stars Scott Baio, Jodie Foster, “and a slew of kid actors in a weird melding of gangster movies and Depression-era musicals.” It’s “a movie I loved so much as a kid that I was afraid to ever revisit it as an adult,” Henderson writes. But he did: “I ignored my jaded adult brain and surrendered to my ageless adoration of the movies. I gave a little love and it all came back to me.”

TV & Streaming

Like a comet, “The Comeback” returns periodically, sparkling and bright. This time around, the “deliciously cringey, self-flagellating” series “thrives largely on the very human art of casting.” As Valerie Cherish, Lisa Kudrow, “of course, is pitch-perfect,” writes Globe TV critic Chris Vognar. “But the bit players are the scene stealers here.” Among them are Tim Bagley, Brittany O’Grady, and 86-year-old Jack O’Brien.

Andrew Goldberg’s documentary “White with Fear” “has as much to do with human emotion as politics.” The PBS film “explores the GOP’s dark mastery of selling racism without being overtly racist — except, of course, when they just say the quiet part out loud,” Vognar writes. “Simply put, fear sells, as does its close cousin, outrage.”

In “The Forsytes,” the latest PBS Masterpiece offering, longtime friends Stephen Moyer and Jack Davenport play brothers. “It gives me a license to be monstrous and him a license to be long-suffering, which is very much the dynamic we have in life,” Davenport says in a high-spirited Q&A with Globe correspondent Annie Sarlin. They talk “The Lion King,” how costuming affects performance, and much more.

Theater

“Suffs,” Shaina Taub’s Tony-winning musical, “generates a propulsive momentum.” The “chronicle of the long, arduous, and ultimately successful fight to win the vote for American women” earns high praise from Globe theater critic Don Aucoin, who compares it to “Hamilton.” The show “stands as a double victory: as a reminder of what dogged reformers can accomplish, and as an example of an important story well told.”

Suzy Eddie Izzard is in town this weekend to play the title role in “Hamlet” — and the play’s other 22 parts. “Very few street performers end up as Shakespearean actors, so I’ve got to bring something different to it,” she tells Globe correspondent Christopher Wallenberg. “[A]s a trans person ... I wanted to play the Ophelia that could have been in me, the Gertrude that could have been in me, as well as the Hamlet, the Laertes, and the Claudius.”

The premise of “The End is Nigh” is “essentially that absurdity is the only proper response to an increasingly absurd world.” Against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic game show, the Liars and Believers presentation “mashes together elements of puppetry, clowning, music, masks, dance, and reality TV to deliver the dead-serious message that we’re poisoning the planet beyond the point of recovery,” Aucoin writes.

Dance

Choreographer My’Kal Stromile danced with Boston Ballet until 2024 and returns this month for the debut of his new piece, “The Leisurely Installation of a New Window.” The three-movement ballet, with a score that incorporates rock guitar and drums, captures “the process of change leading us to this place of transcendence and a new way of living with one another,” Stromile says in a Q&A with Globe correspondent Karen Campbell.

Museums & Visual Art

“Divine Color: Hindu Prints from Modern Bengal,” at the MFA, spotlights “a traditional culture preserved by advancing technology.” In 19th-century Calcutta, printers “embraced lithography as a way to not only distribute Indian cultural icons at mass scale, but translate its age-old myths and literature to broadly popular aesthetics,” writes Globe art critic Murray Whyte. Drawing on the museum’s extensive collections, the show tells the story.

Gustav Klimt’s “Pear Tree, 1903” is this week’s One Special Thing. Scarred by “The Kiss,” the Globe’s Meredith Goldstein welcomed “a new way into Klimt.” He gave the painting to his partner, Emilie Flöge, and “tinkered for years,” she learned at the Harvard Art Museums, where it’s on display. “Seems like a metaphor, right? Love is not still life. You have to keep adjusting and contributing so it can flourish.”

Eighteen architectural models by the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare make up “Sanctuary,” at Brandeis’s Rose Art Museum. “In an eerie reflection of a dangerous time, the exhibition stands sentinel-like in the darkness, connecting this moment in American life to a continuum of fear,” Whyte writes. “Inadvertently, the work also shines a light on an eroding bulwark between public and private, happening right before our eyes.”

The Museum of Modern Art isn’t generally known for fun. “But its holdings also include the archives of the movie magazines Photoplay and Dell,” the Globe’s Mark Feeney writes from New York. “Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography” draws on those resources. Dating from 1921 to 1996, the photographs “are both idealizations, trying to make their sitters as glamorous or appealing or memorable as possible — sometimes all three — and ... utterly workaday.”

Music

A South Shore gas station is hiring. Hiring a viola player. The instrument “massages the heart of the person listening,” Quincy Gas owner Harvey Kertzman tells the Globe’s A.Z. Madonna. “And what better place to hear wonderful music than a gas station?” Given what’s happened to petroleum prices since it was reported, this is the most enjoyable gasoline-adjacent story you’ll read for a long, long time.

The We Black Folk initiative “challenges the public’s often white-washed idea of folk music and welcomes artists of color into the folk community.” Ahead of a showcase tonight in Somerville, founder Cliff Notez says, “I’ve always believed that our artistic scene is a microcosm for what is happening in America.” He chats with Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak, writing for Sound Check. “We’re in the zeitgeist,” he says. “It’s all there.”

“Baseball and music go together.” It must be true — Peter Gammons says so. The end of spring training is “the perfect time to celebrate baseball’s rebirth with a playlist to listen to in the bleachers or on the slow ride to Fenway,” writes Globe correspondent Ken Capobianco. Yes, of course John Fogarty is here. But so are Warren Zevon, Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, and “the great folkie Steve Goodman.”

Mark Erelli calls his new album, “Spring Green,” “the next step in my healing.” Since being diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa in 2020, the singer-songwriter has been “moving through the steps of grief.” The condition “opened me up to this truth that we’re all vulnerable,” he says in a Q&A with Globe correspondent Lauren Daley. “We’re human. We’re imperfect. We’re all in a constant state of loss to some degree.”

After the pandemic derailed one reunion, The Format is back from two decades on the shelf. “As soon as I started writing again and we decided to go make a record, the live stuff just fell in line with it,” vocalist Nate Ruess tells Globe correspondent Maura Johnston. “Now we’re actually excited to play these new songs, and weirdly just as excited to dust off the old ones.” They play Boston twice this week, outdoors and indoors.

Books