Guys & dolls

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...