With economic crisis, is trouble waiting in the wings on Broadway?

If a Martian dropped into New York and saw the latest Broadway grosses, the little guy wouldn’t have a clue about the Wall Street meltdown. In the week that ended last Sunday, “Jersey Boys,” “Wicked,” “South Pacific” and “Mamma Mia!” were still packing in capacity, top-ticket audiences. “Equus” is up $60,000, the new “Seagull” rose $80,000 and, significantly, Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” which opens Thursday, is nearly selling out, up there with the big musicals.

In fact, thanks mainly to the first five previews of “Billy Elliot,” which doesn’t even open until Nov. 13, total Broadway sales went up about $1 million from the previous week.

In other words, in the midst of this scary economy, at least the surface appears to be holding in the theater. Most subscriptions for nonprofit theaters were bought before the market free-fall. Even the Metropolitan Opera began the season with a bigger advance sale than last year.

But don’t be comforted by appearances. Broadway, the major cultural institutions and individual nonprofits are recognizably shell-shocked as they brace themselves for the impact on investors, donors and audiences.

“Objectively, there is much less wealth,” said Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater, speaking at an Off-Broadway panel Oct. 5. “And everybody feels a whole lot poorer than they did three weeks ago.”

It is too soon to know the real damage. Charlotte St. Martin, executive director of the powerful Broadway League, is clearly attempting to barricade the commercial theater against panic. “My biggest fear,” she said last week, “is that negative talk can make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.” She claims the league doesn’t get statistics about advance sales for each show, including the all-important holidays.

“But tourism is still fine,” she said. “Grosses are ahead of last year. I’m sure most individual shows are involved in crisis management. Some investors from Wall Street will dry up. But people tend to continue to go to the theater ... We have 12 shows opening in the first half of the season. If they do well, there will be enough financing to bring new shows in for the second half. If not, people will get nervous.”

In the nonprofits, the already-nervous are looking deeper than New York’s market plunges of 1974, ‘87 and ‘90. Robert Brustein, the critic-playwright who created the Yale Rep and the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard, looks back instead to the 1935 Federal Theatre Project during the Great Depression. The government relief program, killed by Congress after four years, gave work - and an average $20 weekly salary - to more than 15,000 unemployed theater artists under the Works Projects Administration.

One of those workers was a kid named Arthur Miller, out of work after graduation, who took home $22.50 a week as a government-subsidized playwright. Born into privilege on 113th Street and Third Avenue, he was dislocated to Brooklyn when his father lost his women’s coat business. That scent of disappointment came to permeate so many of Miller’s characters, including those in the 1947 war-profiteering drama, “All My Sons,” his second play (and first success), with a revival about to open starring John Lithgow, Dianne Wiest and Katie Holmes.

“The Depression and the Civil War were the only two national events in American history,” Miller told me a year before he died in 2005. “World War I involved a handful of Americans, and World War II was far away. But the Depression affected everybody, and they knew at the time it was affecting them.”

Another giant affected was John Houseman - yes, the crabby old “they earn it” pitchman for Smith Barney - whose extraordinary career as a producer, actor, author, and founder of the Juilliard drama department might never have happened without the Depression. He lost his self-made fortune in the grain market in 1929, which catapulted him into the unlikely position as head of the WPA’s Negro Theater Project.

Nobody is saying another depression will be good for the arts. It is startling to know, however, that our Depression-era government considered artists important enough to allocate 1 percent of the WPA’s $5 billion national budget to cultural work relief. According to the memoirs of the late Houseman, the Federal Theatre, in its brief life, played to more than 30 million people in more than 200 theaters, schools and parks around the country.

Will anyone care enough this time? The Americans for the Arts Action Fund, which says the nonprofit arts generate about $166.2 billion in annual revenue and $12.6 billion in taxes, asked both presidential candidates for arts-policy platforms. Sen. Barack Obama established a 33-person committee to compile a document that supports a national artists corps and would increase funding for the National Endowment for the Arts - the agency virtually obliterated during the Reagan-Bush ‘80s. Two weekends ago, Sen. John McCain issued a four-line statement in favor of arts education based on “the needs of local schools and school districts.”

Meanwhile, the nonprofits are watching the fates of their invested endowments. Collateral damage may extend to the diverse institutions funded by the Lehman Brothers Foundation, which, like Merrill Lynch, pledged $3 million to the Lincoln Center redevelopment.

Diane Paulis, director of “Hair” and new artistic director at Harvard’s A.R.T., is trying to approach the crisis as an opportunity. “I am interested in this moment,” she says. “I do theater because I’m interested in the world.”

Eustis says, “It’s going to be serious, but we have seen a lot of serious things. And culture does well in bad times. We have a really unsettling, disturbing impulse to gather together and look for larger meaning.” Of course, “the economics are going to be a challenge.”

He smiles at the understatement, which is a start.