Welcome back to The Big To-Do. People in caps and gowns are roaming the streets, summer weather and (the earliest possible) Memorial Day are on the horizon, and Will Ferrell is hosting the “Saturday Night Live” season finale, with musical guest Paul McCartney. That must mean it’s time for the Globe’s Summer Arts Guide, a comprehensive look at artsy events and cultural happenings all over New England through September.

This week’s One Special Thing is a 13-year-old album that entranced an 11-year-old listener. From “a slew of new movies and TV shows” on streaming, the Globe’s Matt Juul offers his picks. The arts brief section The Rundown includes the scoop on tomorrow’s Greater Roxbury Book Fair. And the countdown is on for the May 21 series finale of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

If none of that appeals, consider the snuggliest Globe story of the week. Therapy animals tend to be dogs and horses, but a New Hampshire couple had a different idea. The Globe’s Amanda Gokee heads to Granite Oak Farm to “cozy up to the cows and see what has kept people coming back to cuddle with them.”

Summer Arts Guide

Outdoor and indoor, original and reimagined, classic and contemporary, highbrow and lowbrow — the summer arts calendar has it all. The Globe’s critics and contributors have cast a wide net and returned with “an all-encompassing guide to help you make the most of summer,” starting next week and ending 80 entries later.

The movie schedule abounds with, in Odie Henderson’s words, “sequels, prequels, remakes, and other assorted abuses of cinematic intellectual property.” From Christopher Nolan’s take on “The Odyssey,” starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, to “Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie,” and from the Minions to not one but two appearances by Johnny Knoxville, this list offers something for everyone.

This year’s crop of summer streaming series looks great, with big names ranging from Larry David to Laura Ingalls Wilder (that’s some range). Chris Vognar’s descriptions of 10 high-profile offerings include the following: “Ain’t no Bardem like an evil Bardem,” “intergalactic cops,” “Young adults in New York!,” and “Nicolas Cage plays a beaten-down 1930s private eye with super spidey powers.” Sold!

Among Vognar’s picks is “The Boroughs,” set in a retirement community with an infestation — of monsters. The residents take them on. “For actors of my age, good parts start to get thin on the ground, and this had real quality in the script,” says Alfred Molina, who stars alongside Alfre Woodard, Geena Davis, Bill Pullman, and Jane Kaczmarek. Stuart Miller has a preview.

The renovated Cape Ann Museum is reopening with a bang. “Avery, Gottlieb, Rothko: By the Sea” features early work by Mark Rothko, “Abstract Expressionism’s high priest of the oblique sublime,” writes Murray Whyte. “In Gloucester, Rothko developed his vision and technique alongside Adolph Gottlieb, his close friend, and Milton Avery, a mentor to them both.”

The original plan was for Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 15, “Lincoln,” to have its world premiere at the Kennedy Center. It’s now set for Tanglewood, with Zachary James in the title role. Glass is “my very favorite composer on the planet, and my very favorite collaborator,” James tells A.Z. Madonna. He calls the composition “a reflection on the fragility of democracy.”

The Black Crowes “have started to receive the acclaim they were often denied during the ‘rock wars of the ’90s.” On tour promoting “A Pound of Feathers,” frontman Chris Robinson presses pause and talks with Victoria Wasylak about the music industry, genre pigeonholing, and the evolution of his “musical friendship” with Aerosmith’s Joe Perry into a “friendship-friendship.”

The musical adaptation of “Black Swan,” Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film, “pulses with new life.” The ART production “borrows from the film’s reliance on mirrors as a storytelling tool,” reports Sonia Rao. Says director-choreographer Sonya Tayeh, “Mirror as reflection, mirror as pressure, mirror as boogeyman — all of that is so alive in the space.”

Comedian Chris Fleming, who grew up in Stow, “doesn’t feel like an overnight success.” But his blockbuster special “Live at the Palace” set off a flurry of activity that makes it tough to use any other description. He chats with Nick A. Zaino III about a “very surprising and fun” experience.

As the Akram Khan Company winds down, one of its final appearances will be at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. “Thikra” (Arabic for “memory”) “was conceived as an annual gathering of a tribe of women who come together to awaken the spirits of their ancestors,” Karen Campbell writes. Says Khan, “The ritual of remembering could not be more relevant in our time.”

Mo​vies

Alesha Harris’s “Is God Is,” an adaptation of her hit off-Broadway play, earns 3½ stars from Globe film critic Odie Henderson. The “Southern Gothic story of domestic violence ... has the aura of Greek tragedy and the darkest heart of neo-noir.” Playing sisters literally scarred by a childhood incident, Mallori Johnson “is alternately tough and heartbreaking,” and Kara Young “gives ‘Is God Is’ its righteous indignation.”

“Obsession,” a.k.a. “Gen-Z’s answer to ‘Fatal Attraction,’” is “a movie you’ll want to watch with an audience.” Writer-director Curry Barker’s be-careful-what-you-wish-for story “tries to say something about female autonomy and male selfishness, yet the film plays like an overlong, 108-minute riff on the old reliable stand-up routine subject ‘girlfriends be crazy,’” Henderson writes in a 2½-star review.

Lawrence Kasdan’s documentary “Marty, Life Is Short” carries “a bittersweet undercurrent of loss that will remind you that life is indeed short.” Martin Short’s “life and career are likened to a rollercoaster, with ups and downs that he somehow manages to ride out with minimal fanfare,” writes Henderson, awarding 3 stars. The result “is far from a downer. A film full of funny people celebrating a man who lives to perform can’t help but be hilarious.”

TV & Streaming

“Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery” revisits the late-’90s all-woman music festival organized by Sarah McLachlan. Ally Pankiw’s documentary “makes for good if slightly painful watching,” writes the Globe’s Lisa Weidenfeld. “The tidal wave of misogyny that greeted the festival feels both very much of its era but also, in retrospect, a clear predictor of what would happen in America in the years to come.”

Museums & Visual Art

“Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude,” at the MFA, is “clamorous, unruly, and at times a little squirm-inducing.” The “implied question — take back from whom? — has its answer built in: In art history, ‘nude’ almost always means ‘nude woman,’” writes Globe art critic Murray Whyte. “The mostly unquestioning reverence that nudes have commanded over the ages is what’s being disrupted here.”

Theater

Two-plus millennia later, Sophocles still knows what’s what. Luis Alfaro’s “Oedipus El Rey” moves “Oedipus Rex” to the LA barrio and creates “one remarkable night at the theater,” writes Globe reviewer Ty Burr. The Huntington production is “[g]ripping, inventive, comic on the fringes, yet inexorable in its slow lowering of the boom on a tyrant who believes himself invincible. before rippling out from there.”

Dance

Boston Ballet’s “Spring Experience” is “first-class stuff.” The highest of the program’s high points is Jerome Robbins’s “Dances at a Gathering,” Globe reviewer Jeffrey Gantz writes. “The dancers might be reenacting past intimacies, or trying out new ones, or dreaming. They move as if rehearsing, making what’s difficult look light and easy.” Through Sunday.

Music

Drake’s third studio album, “Nothing Was the Same,” is this week’s One Special Thing. The first track, “Tuscan Leather,” “forced me to truly listen for the first time,” writes the Globe’s Auzzy Byrdsell, who was 11 at the time. “By the time the album was done, it felt like the previous hour had taken me into a new world that only I could enter. Since that day, I’ve chased that feeling in most of the music I listen to.”

The “oddly familiar melodies and hackneyed lyrics” of AI-generated music are bad enough. “AI is worming its way into the music industry in more unexpected ways, namely via visual art like show fliers and merchandise designs,” Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak writes for Sound Check. She looks at how the technology is catching on, and the ways artists are embracing and rejecting it.

Books

Set in a Northern California exurb, Vanessa Hua’s “Coyoteland” features a real coyote that’s far from the most dangerous mammal in the story. Before long, “it’s clear that the people of El Nido are just as predatory as its wildlife,” writes Globe reviewer Marion Winik. A new family arrives in town, sparking the drama that drives Hua’s “electric” novel, “which ultimately explodes in a catastrophic, gripping finale.”

In “Glyph,” Ali Smith “makes her case beautifully: art points the way forward.” The novel follows sisters Petra and Patch between the past and their “uneasy present,” Globe reviewer Hamilton Cain writes. “Smith’s jazzy slang cuts her natural lyricism in all the right ways, her punctuation and sentence rhythms attuned to speech. Her eye is crucial, her ear more so — she’s both funny and furious.”

Today’s newsletter was written by Marie Morris and produced by the Globe Living/Arts staff. Marie Morris can be reached at marie.morris@globe.com. Thanks for reading.

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