When Bruce Springsteen walks onstage on June 26 in the first show to return to Broadway, his audience will have had to prove that they’ve been vaccinated. And those inoculations have to be with vaccines approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration: Moderna’s, Pfizer-BioNTech’s, or Johnson & Johnson’s.
That is bad news for the Boss’s fans in Canada, where 1.7 million people have received the AstraZeneca vaccine. “Burn in the U.S.A.,” The Toronto Star headlined its report on Wednesday.
New York’s St. James Theater, where Mr. Springsteen will perform, describes the show as “a solo acoustic performance” and “an intimate night with Bruce, his guitar, a piano and his stories.” On Tuesday the theater announced that it would only accept proof of F.D.A.-approved vaccines “at the direction of New York State.”
Attendees under 16 are exempt from the requirement but must be accompanied by a fully vaccinated adult and show proof they tested negative on a recent coronavirus test. There are no exceptions for people who are unable or unwilling to be vaccinated.
The two-hour-plus show debuted in 2017 at the Walter Kerr Theatre and ran for 236 performances. Like those shows, the coming series will run Tuesday through Saturday. It is a demanding schedule for a septuagenarian rock star, but Mr. Springsteen has said he has no plans on slowing down after six decades onstage, and that playing live shows remained “an experience that cannot yet be simulated.”
“I’m at a point in my playing life and artistic life where I’ve never felt as vital,” he told The New York Times last year.
With other Broadway shows also returning in September, the vaccination rules governing Mr. Springsteen’s show could portend trouble for visitors to New York who cannot present proof that they have received a U.S.-approved vaccine. The Toronto Star said it could “be just the beginning of bureaucratic vaccine woes, as the world starts to reopen with a patchwork of different approved shots.”
