After a year of waiting, the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center (The Kate) is getting back to holding full capacity shows and conducting business as usual.

The Kate is a performance space dedicated to the famous actress Katherine Hepburn, who lived in Old Saybrook. The building has a museum dedicated to Hepburn and hosts various shows in its theater throughout the year. Though the space is a familiar institution to those in area, like everywhere else it was forced to close down for a substantial amount of time and adopt a virtual model for some events in 2020.

The Kate reopened several months ago for limited capacity in-person shows, but now full capacity crowds are back and the calendar is quickly filling up, according to The Kate’s Executive Director Brett Elliott.

“For The Kate, we are back to capacity and we are following the CDC guidelines for masks for unvaccinated people in the audience,” said Elliott.

For now, there will be one or two shows a week, but Elliott said that in the second half of the summer and the fall is when the calendar will get extremely busy.

Elliott said that the very popular education opportunities and Kate’s Camp for Kids is also back to in person.

“We’re really excited by that. That is our signature kid’s camp and it’s wonderful it’s back,” said Elliott.

Between the shows and camps, Elliott said the Kate will soon see a lot of activity.

“Now we’re about to have a show every weekend at capacity and we usually do shows for or five days a week and have something happening at The Kate every day,” said Elliott

Due to the COVID-19 shutdown the bulk of The Kate’s shows have had to be rescheduled for this year.

“All in all, it affected about 325 calendar slots,” said Elliott. “It was giant, messy, jigsaw puzzle to put back together and we’re still working on finalizing some shows.”

At the end of March, The Kate finally hosted a live music show with a limited capacity crowd for the first time in more than a year. When the state relaxed some of the COVID guidelines, The Kate was once again able to fill to capacity.

“It’s a good thing to be back and we look forward to seeing our patrons again when they feel comfortable coming back,” Elliott said.

Last year Elliott said The Kate had to “reimagine” how it did business, which meat shifting to virtual or hybrid models of some events with limited capacity.

“The guidelines changed faster than we were prepared for,” said Elliott.

It was the support of the community that Elliott said made a big difference over the last year.

“As a nonprofit, we’re very grateful for the people who supported us,” said Elliott.