This weekend, “Wicked” lights up cinema screens across the country and around the world, joining “Mamma Mia!” and “Chicago” and “Hairspray” among Broadway musicals and “A Few Good Men,” “The Odd Couple,” “Arsenic and Old Lace” and (let us newspaper people not forget) “The Front Page” among straight plays that found big-screen success. And though it’s early yet, the smart money says the “Wizard of Oz” prequel will make hundreds of millions of dollars. This isn’t a movie review. We don’t get advance tickets to screenings and haven’t managed to get a ticket to mostly sold-out shows. We do, however, hope the film does very well because it serves as a timely reminder that the Great White Way is an economic and cultural powerhouse without peer for our city. In 1980, Broadway shows collectively grossed under $200 million. Today, a typical season brings in $1.5 billion. If not for COVID, which dealt a huge blow, trendlines say New York’s theater district would be grossing well more than $2 billion per season. That’s just direct ticket sales; add up all the economic impacts, and Broadway contributes nearly $15 billion to the city’s economy, supporting nearly 100,000 direct and indirect jobs. Millions of people who come to the city are drawn mainly to take in a show or two or three. They stay in hotel rooms, eat in restaurants and buy bags of stuff to take back to the suburbs or Texas or France or Hong Kong. Broadway would be worth celebrating if it were only an economic electromagnet, but it’s so much more. It draws the best singers and dancers and actors and writers, making us a place overflowing with talent. Broadway is often used as a synecdoche for a larger theater ecosystem from which iconic American performers from Viola Davis to Al Pacino to Denzel Washington to Meryl Streep to Lin Miranda have emerged. All that helps define the culture of these United States, which is one of the things the rest of the world rightly loves the most about our country. So Broadway is a treasure to protect. It’s also the anchor of a swath of the city, Midtown Manhattan, that must be eternally safeguarded. Midtown South precinct, which includes Times Square, is safe in many respects — overall crime counts there are way down from 20 years ago — but felony assaults there are up 10% over this time last year, and are up 186% over 14 years ago. Midtown North precinct, which includes other parts of the Theater District, is similarly safer than it was 20 years ago — but felony assaults and robberies are up 61% and 70% respectively compared to last year, and 124% and 65% compared to 14 years ago.  These are problems to be solved, especially after the horrible stabbing murders of three people in the general vicinity of Midtown. Visitors shouldn’t be dissuaded from coming to New York, but the reality is, some are. When they take in “Wicked,” millions of people will escape their complicated lives to visit a land of flying monkeys, Munchkins and yellow brick roads. But right here and now on earth, on gray city sidewalks, ever more magic is being born. More magic, and more opportunity for the greatest city in the world.