Adele cancels tonight's show

Arguably the most sought-out concert ticket of the year, Adele's show tonight at First Avenue has been postponed due to illness. A rescheduled date has already been set for June 22. All tickets to tonight's concert will be honored then.

Word of the postponement arrived just three hours before showtime, and just a few hours after the No. 1 British singer tried to soundcheck at the club. A press release from her publicists at Columbia Records said she is suffering from laryngitis. However, it said she "hopes that with two days of bed rest she can resume her sold-out tour on Saturday" (her next scheduled gig in Denver).

"She's really sick," said First Ave general manager Nate Kranz. "She tried to sing at soundcheck and her throat hurt really too bad. They took her to a specialist."

Fans who heard Adele talking and singing without any trouble this afternoon on Cities 97 should note: That was pre-taped back in October. The 22-year-old soul-pop wunderkind is well-known to be a stage-shy performer, but that doesn't appear to be a culprit here: "She can't sing," Kranz reiterated. First Ave's veteran stage manager Conrad Sverkerson was on the scene for the soundcheck and said Adele got out a few notes, and that was it, she knew her voice was shot.

Looking at the rest of Adele's tour itinerary, the rescheduled date would be the final stop of her current U.S. tour, which was to wrap June 20 in Nashville. Word is she still plans to still make her next gig Saturday in Denver.

As for the many fans who paid some of the hugely inflated re-sale/scalper prices for the First Ave gig, you don't need to worry, according to a representative at local brokerage Ticket King. "As long as the show is just a postponement and gets rescheduled, the original tickets will still be honored at the venue," said Ticket King's Cortney Storsved. The starting price on tickets when we checked two days ago at Stubhub.com was $384.

Adele's current trek across the U.S. was intended to be an "underplay tour" from the outset, the kind of thing where artists perform in smaller venues to help build hype for a new record. But then it became an underplay on a whole other level over the past two months as her second album, "21," has rocketed to the top of the charts. It has spent eight weeks at the No. 1 slot on the Billboard album chart and seems destined to compete with Lady Gaga's new one for the biggest selling record of the year. The rescheduled date might even be a hotter ticket than tonight's was.