It is not news to say that the past 18 months have been absolutely devastating to the live entertainment industry. Every human being has had their life uprooted and disrupted by this pandemic; few industries have been hit as specifically as live music and live comedy. We are one of the lucky venues to have made it this far, but we recognize that COVID-19 isn’t going away anytime soon and that true normalcy is still very much in the distance.

After months of discussions with our patrons and our staff, as well as many touring artists from around the country, we have decided that the most responsible choice we as a venue could make moving forward is to require vaccination against COVID-19 OR proof of a negative COVID-19 test from within the past 72 hours to attend our ticketed events.

We know that some people will be happy about this; we’ve heard time and time again that some people are opting out of seeing live entertainment indoors at venues not requiring proof of vaccination. We hope that these people might feel more inclined to come out because of this change in policy!

We also know that this decision might disappoint some people. We hate this. We pride ourselves on being an inclusive environment for everyone, a safe space, a place where (truly) everyone knows your name and cares about how your day went. We understand that some might see this decision as being at odds with our core value of being as inclusive as possible. Complicated times call for complicated judgment calls and this is where we’re coming down in this one. We believe that the safety of many outweighs the personal preferences of one. Even if you disagree with our call we hope your can respect why we’ve arrived here and that our intentions are altruistic.

As of now this policy only applies to ticketed events at The RINO. These are our evenings with the highest attendance and therefore the evenings on which we have an increased responsibility to our patrons to operate as safely as possible.

Please wash your hands and be excellent to one another.
The RINO