“It’s surreal to see you all in facemasks,” she blurted out at one point. But it was clear that it took some adjustment for her. The audience at the early performance tried to make up for the scattered atmosphere with an unusual amount of shouted encouragement for Evans. Most significantly, everybody was required to wear a mask throughout the show. The 669-seat theater had to be widely separated out for individuals and household groups. Saturday’s double performance at the historic Beacon Theatre in Hopewell, Va., south of the state capital of Richmond, was more fraught with pandemic adjustments. Under a crescent moon after an early-evening rain, a relaxed and appreciative crowd of several hundred greeted Sara Evans’s older hits and several selections from Copy That. Circular “pods” were marked off for individuals and family groups that had passed through temperature checks, with masks required only when individuals moved out of the pods. So on the evening of July 24, the Harvester Performance Center in Rocky Mount, Va., east of Roanoke in the state’s picturesque Shenandoah Valley, commandeered a lot across the street for an outdoors performance that wasn’t that hard to pull off once the early-arriving crowd had made its way in. But the limit is easier to reach if the venue is something other than a traditional auditorium where distancing rules between individuals or households make it impossible to fill anywhere near half the space. The May 15 album release by her own label was followed by Virginia’s July 1 entry into its “Phase 3” reopening, which may contain a cornucopia of cleaning and distancing rules but has a strikingly permissive limit on entertainment venues that can theoretically run up to half-full if their normal capacity is under 1,000 people. The all-cover-songs album, titled Copy That, stretches beyond country music to a variety of rock, pop, and even disco styles that Evans sang as a kid in bar bands. Evans came armed with a new CD to promote and her own “Born To Fly Records” label to support.

Imagine three very different audience vibes multiplied by the stress of the pandemic, and you’ll have a sense of the variety of what Sara Evans and her fans from every generation encountered. Yet here’s the surprise from a flash tour by Sara Evans around the state of Virginia last weekend: After all the masks, temperature checks, and distancing rules are accounted for, the measure of any event’s success remains the buzz-worthiness of the individual concert atmosphere, just as it always was before. Match a highly motivated country-music star with three eager venues in a state that allows up to half capacity in entertainment facilities, and what do you get? A very early test of what’s bound to be a long and grinding path back to live performing arts in the coronavirus era.

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