Summing up the state of the New York legitimate theater on the last page of his gossipy book Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway, Michael Riedel runs through a list of some long-running hits and ends the book with this line: “Broadway is in the midst of its new Golden Age.”1 That sentence was true as recently as March, when Riedel thought his book was finished. He added a foreword in May acknowledging that the title he had chosen had taken an ironic turn. Today Broadway is in the midst of not a golden age but a coma. Notwithstanding the preternatural pep of the theater community, it may never recover. A full reopening remains many months away, with the most optimistic observers speculating that a partial reopening may be feasible by late summer. What then? Theatergoers are famously more high-strung than, say, nascar enthusiasts, and no one knows whether the audience will ever fully regain its pre-covid enthusiasm for an experience that involves sitting in a tightly packed space for three hours with 1,800 cheering, coughing, and sneezing strangers. Even should the current virus be vanquished—a process that would require Bill de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo suddenly to acquire a level of competence neither has ever approached—future potential ticket buyers will be calculating the possibility that another lethal and highly contagious virus could waft in to take its place. After 9/11, when Broadway was described as facing its biggest crisis in thirty years, it reopened