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    Foo Fighters Will Play First Concert Back at Madison Square Garden

    The first full-capacity arena concert in New York since March 2020 will feature rock ’n’ roll — but only for fans who are fully vaccinated — on June 20.For the first time in more than 15 months, Madison Square Garden is gearing up to host a rock ’n’ roll concert without social distancing, masks or capacity caps.Foo Fighters will perform on June 20 — but only for fans who are fully vaccinated. It will be the first full-capacity concert in a New York arena since March 2020.“We’ve been waiting for this day for over a year,” Dave Grohl, the band’s frontman, said in a statement on Tuesday, telling fans to prepare for a long night “of screaming our heads off together to 26 years of Foos.”Audience members will be required to show proof of full Covid-19 vaccination along with their tickets to enter the venue, James L. Dolan, the executive chairman and chief executive of Madison Square Garden Entertainment, said in a statement. Tickets will go on sale on Friday at 10 a.m. at prices of $50 to $119.Full-capacity concerts represent the latest sign of a return to cultural life in Manhattan. On Monday, Bruce Springsteen announced that “Springsteen on Broadway,” the rock legend’s autobiographical show, would come back for a limited run that begins performances at the St. James Theater on June 26.Although most Broadway theaters and producers are still holding off on opening until after Labor Day, a drop in coronavirus cases and increasing vaccination rate in the United States have encouraged many producers and performers to accelerate their plans.Fans have been able to attend N.B.A. playoff games at the Garden, where the New York Knicks play, with separate sections for fully vaccinated and unvaccinated fans. (The Knicks were eliminated last week, paving the way for concerts.)The June show is part of a Foo Fighters tour that was meant to celebrate the band’s 25th anniversary, but was postponed a year because of the pandemic. The group last performed at the Garden in July 2018, when it sold out two nights on its Concrete and Gold Tour. During 2020, the band released its 10th studio album, “Medicine at Midnight,” and Grohl engaged in a playful drum battle with the then 10-year-old prodigy Nandi Bushell that delighted fans on social media.Foo Fighters will also be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in October — an honor they earned in their first year of eligibility.Other concerts booked for Madison Square Garden include Eagles in August, as well as the Mexican group Banda MS and the country duo Dan + Shay in September. Harry Styles will perform for five nights in October, and Billy Joel will resume his monthly residency in November. Concerts will return to Barclays Center in Brooklyn in September with Marc Anthony. More

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    Stephen Colbert’s late-night show will resume filming soon before a vaccinated live audience.

    Stephen Colbert’s late-night talk show will return to filming in front of a studio audience on June 14, CBS said on Monday.About 400 audience members will be allowed in the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway in Manhattan, provided they can show proof of vaccination against the coronavirus, such as through the Excelsior Pass issued by New York State or an original physical vaccination card from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There will be no capacity restrictions, and masks will be optional.CBS said that staff and crew members will be tested for the virus before starting work and will be screened daily for symptoms, monitored by a Covid-19 compliance officer. The network said the plan comports with New York State guidelines.The show’s changes will come just a few months before Broadway shows are expected to return, and about a month after baseball stadiums in New York began designating separate seating sections for people who have been vaccinated and those who have not.Last week Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo relaxed the state’s capacity restrictions, allowing businesses to serve as many patrons as they like as long as there is enough space for people to adequately socially distance. He also ended the mask mandate for vaccinated people indoors and outdoors, though individual businesses are allowed to have stricter mask policies.The pandemic put a stop to many late-night talk shows for a time in mid-March 2020, when New York and Los Angeles, where many of them are produced, introduced strict social distancing and quarantine guidelines.Since then, the shows have had to get creative, interviewing guests by video conference and filming in empty studios or from the hosts’ homes, with family members sometimes serving on the crew.When Mr. Colbert began doing his show from home, the first episode had him delivering the monologue from his bathtub. At the time, Mr. Colbert and the network changed the name from “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” to “A Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” to reflect the show’s straitened circumstances. The name will return to normal once the audience returns.A screengrab from the first episode shot at home.CBS“Over the last 437 days, my staff and crew (and family!) have amazed me with their professionalism and creativity as we made shows for an audience we couldn’t see or hear,” Mr. Colbert said in a statement included in CBS’s announcement on Monday. “I look forward to once again doing shows for an audience I can smell and touch.”The show resumed studio production in August 2020, using a small set in the Ed Sullivan Theater, a far cry from Mr. Colbert’s normal setting. Of the 205 episodes shot without a live audience so far, 16 have been broadcast live, including an impromptu reaction to the Jan. 6 Capitol assault.During a recent interview on “Fresh Air,” Mr. Colbert said that working without an audience created challenges that only a crowd could ameliorate.“I’m much more likely to mess up and have to retake something, lose the rhythm of a joke, or even just misread the prompter without an audience there, because there’s some vital performance adrenaline spark that’s missing that the audience provides,” Mr. Colbert said. “And so my wife and my kids have seen me absolutely shank monologues over and over again. And it’s very humbling for them to realize that I’m not that good at this.” More