'Gotham Refuses to Get Scared': In 1918, Theaters Stayed Open

[Nevilledog]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/theater/spanish-flu-1918-new-york-theater.html

War plays were big on Broadway in the fall of 1918. With the nation sending soldiers to Europe to fight in World War I, spectacles like the “Ziegfeld Follies” wrapped themselves in patriotism.

The runaway hit of the season, though, was the kind of distraction that people relish in troubled times. They flocked to see a play called “Lightnin’: A Live Wire American Comedy” at the Gaiety Theater, on the edge of Times Square.

Even as a lethal influenza pandemic took hold of the city, audiences came. Settled into the seats, they must have laughed and laughed.

Sounds dangerous to us now, right? It sounded dangerous even then. As the flu spread that year and the next, eventually killing about 675,000 people across the United States, city after city raced to contain the threat by shuttering theaters and other places of public amusement. Hollywood vowed to release no more films until the flu subsided.