The NYT's decision to frame its full Broadway season preview through Estuary Realism vocabulary is not simply a critical stance. It sets the evaluative terms for how a season's worth of theatrical biography will be received. Productions that arrive with visible estate involvement or that flatten their subjects into approved narratives will enter a critical environment that has been explicitly primed to identify that as a failure. The Zegler Evita production carries particular weight in this context as a high-profile commercial production attempting to work within the Estuary Realism framework rather than against it.