Dear Theater Fans, Hello! Your friendly neighborhood theater critic Helen Shaw here, stepping in to write about the wild week we’ve had. If you heard a collective phew from the Broadway critics in your life, it may have been because the season just came to an end. Our dash to the final day of Tony eligibility has been exhilarating, but it will be nice to relax back into the theater’s calmer patterns. It was a heck of a last push: We saw the rather low-ebb “Beaches”; the high-octane “The Rocky Horror Show,” which features the blistering Luke Evans pulling on Frank-N-Furter’s fishnets; the beautiful “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” with its cast that includes a longtime August Wilson veteran, the great Ruben Santiago-Hudson; and the latest vampire musical, “The Lost Boys,” which allows a spectacular design team to sink its teeth — bwa ha ha — into Broadway. Michael Paulson looked into the rising trend of celebrity producers on Broadway. To my mind, it’s a wonderfully positive use of name recognition to buoy the arts. Having celebrities on the stage can certainly lead to huge box office returns, but that promise can vanish suddenly, as it did when Megan Thee Stallion announced she would be leaving “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” on Friday, two weeks ahead of schedule. Still, footage of her fighting tears at a recent curtain call makes it clear that her fans are behind her, no matter what — we are all Hotties, in our hearts. In the lull before the announcement of the Tony nominations next Tuesday, my (pinwheeling) eyes are also readjusting to see the world again beyond Broadway openings. There’s a revival of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” in Stratford-upon-Avon — our review of it is sending me back to my own battered copy of that text — and David Henry Hwang has taken a second crack at revising Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Flower Drum Song,” this time for the East West Players in Los Angeles. Salamishah Tillet spoke with Ayo Edebiri and Don Cheadle about how they developed their tender father-daughter dynamic in “Proof,” the Broadway play they say has been prismatically shifted by being reimagined for a Black family. And Tim Teeman talked to Misha Shayok Chowdhury about his inspirations for “Rheology,” a half-play, half-confessional that Chowdhury is performing at Playwrights Horizons with his mother, the physicist Bulbul Chakraborty. I’m using Tim’s piece partly as a “what to read next” list, since it includes recommendations of crucial Rabindranath Tagore plays and poems, many set to music. As for what to see next? You should probably try to get tickets now to the Metrograph’s inconceivably groovy series of Wallace Shawn movies — from “Clueless” to “Vanya on 42nd Street” — because each screening includes a post-movie talk with Shawn himself. For the near term, I’m most excited for a one-night-only performance tomorrow of Suzanne Bocanegra’s “Rerememberer” at Bang on a Can’s Long Play music festival at Roulette, in which the fabric artist and theater provocateuse weaves a score for amplified loom. Sounds … cozy, right? Not when you hear that the other musicians will be 50 people picking up the violin for the first time. I look forward to a night of unbridled mayhem. Those Lost Boys could never. And make sure to be on the lookout for a special “Tony nominations” edition of the Theater Update newsletter in your inbox next Tuesday. In the meantime, please reach out to us at theaterfeedback@nytimes.com with suggestions for articles or to offer your thoughts about our coverage. And urge your friends to subscribe to this newsletter. Yours theatrically,
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