- 1 hour ago
Stephen Colbert takes Architectural Digest inside the iconic Ed Sullivan Theater for a full tour of ‘The Late Show’ set. From the restoration of the historic dome and chandelier to secret doors, and Stephen’s personal easter eggs, explore the design details behind one of New York City’s most famous TV studios. Once home to David Letterman and guests such as The Beatles and Elvis, discover how the theatre was transformed into a modern late-night set.
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00:00Hey everybody, I'm Stephen Colbert and welcome to the Ed Sullivan Theatre.
00:23This is the set of The Late Show which was installed 11 years ago by the set
00:29designer Jim Fenhagen. He also did the Colbert Report back in the day. We're here in the Ed Sullivan
00:33Theatre built in 1927 by Hammerstein, I think Arthur Hammerstein. It was meant to be a cathedral of
00:40culture. This was a TV studio before Letterman was ever in here. Of course before that Mr. Sullivan
00:45and Jackie Gleason too had his show here. The first Honeymooners were shot here. When we first came in
00:50here, I mean I'd been on Dave's show 10 times and I never got a sense of what the space
00:55was really
00:55like. It had a much lower lighting grid which was really just above that back rail there on the
01:01balcony. Because this was such a hard surface for recording audio, literally there was so much
01:08bounce. There were huge sound sails, basically just big sound baffles of thick fabric up there in order
01:13to try to deaden the sound so you wouldn't get so much slap back on your mics. I wanted to
01:18know what
01:18it was like, what the dome was like because I'd seen the old photographs of the painted sort of a
01:22Moroccan or Moorish design up there. And they said, oh it's all gone. It was all torn out in the
01:271950s.
01:28And I said, well I would like to just go see. And so they took down the sound sails and
01:32it was all
01:33still there. And so we went to CBS and God bless them, they gave us the money to restore it.
01:38One of
01:38the most amazing things is that we found out that this giant plasterwork chandelier that everyone said
01:43there's no way it was still up there, was still up there. I couldn't believe it had been hidden all
01:48these years. And it also has its own stained glass, some of which had to be restored. There were workmen
01:53in there like with toothbrushes cleaning out everything. They found cigars and tools and
01:59traffic tickets from the 1940s and 1950s up there. So you can now see these beautiful backlit pieces
02:06of stained glass that all show musicians and artists rather than saints. And then because we wanted the
02:12audience to be able to see all of this beauty, Mike Skricka designed this lighting rig here.
02:24I'm Michael Skricka. I'm the lighting designer for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Because it's a
02:29landmark building, there was an architectural review board that had to go over everything and make sure
02:34that what we were doing was not going to damage the existing structure at all. When I built the truss,
02:40you don't want to put a square truss in a round room. It's oval to integrate in with the shape
02:45of
02:45the theater. The dome is all bit mapped so you can project exactly what you want up in the dome.
02:51There are six projectors on the truss that project images around the room. I call these the Mondrian
02:56panels and it's all the little squares in the set and every one of them can change to any given
03:03color.
03:03Can I go through a couple right now? Hillary, can you go to the interview? So this is the act
03:12one
03:12interview. The first interview is always this blue orange look. Next. And then the act three is kind
03:19of all orange. If we have a political guest on, can I see red, white, and blue? The old show
03:25with the
03:25Colbert Report was very patriotic. And I was like, do you want to have the same thing? And he was
03:30like,
03:30Mike, I want the same thing, but I want it to feel like we're in Soviet Russia. And if they
03:36see
03:36anything American, we're all going to the gulag. So you have to hide it in this set. So if you
03:41look
03:41at that wall, there's actually an American flag built into the lighting of that wall. There's like
03:46a blue field up top and then there's alternating red and white stripes that go down. That's one of
03:50my favorite nuggets that I hid in the set. The stained glass was kind of a find. When we were
03:56renovating the
03:57theater, we thought they had removed the stained glass. Upon closer inspection, we realized it was
04:01just white vinyl. So after they peeled it back, I was like, we have to light these, but I hadn't
04:06planned to. So we just got some string lights and we lowered them in from the ceiling and it worked
04:11so well that we never changed it. If you look over here, we put a couple of nods to CBS
04:22in the set.
04:23You can see the C and the B and the beginning of an S over there as if you're looking
04:27out through
04:28these at a building next door that has an advertisement painted on it. And if you look
04:33closely, you see O-U-R-R-V-I-C-E, one hour service, and that the show is one
04:41hour long. And that's what
04:41this is. It's meant to look like an old Packer ad that used to be on the bar across the
04:45street from
04:46Second City when I was starting off my career. The Invader, the artist came in and put it in one
04:51day,
04:52just showed up and it was there. Isn't that cool? If you look on the old Ed Sullivan, all of
04:56this is
04:56exactly the same. All of this down here, it's like there's a time machine. All that iron work back there,
05:02all the plaster work, all the sort of the groin work there. The girls screaming for the Beatles
05:07were high and away up there because Mr. Sullivan didn't want them down here because this was a
05:12nice place to go out for the evening and people were getting their dresses and their gloves and
05:16their ties. And so those crazy girls, he said, put them up there. But if you look at all the
05:20shots,
05:20you can see that the arches, all that neo-Gothic work is really close to them and arching over their
05:25heads. Supposedly, the historian when we first got here said that Elvis essentially performed right
05:30around here where the desk is. And then the Beatles, being a larger group, were up-center.
05:34All the bands that came on would be up-center with this thing flown away and the back wall
05:39would have been dressed.
05:45I'm Louis Cato and I am the band leader and musical director of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
05:50Welcome to the bandstand. This is where all the musical tapestry for our show happens.
05:55Stephen wanted a feel of a bandstand, which kind of goes back to the 1920s and 30s, like Cab Calloway,
06:02Duke Ellington. Everyone was reading music, so the actual music stands. But in 2026, we've got
06:08iPads up here that we communicate. So this knee wall kind of just as a little homage to the bandstand
06:14era. We're a six-piece band. I guess seven with myself included. Joe Saylor, our drummer,
06:20he and I are kind of like the two OGs that have been here since day one. Back here, our
06:25amazing
06:26percussionist, Nega Santos. It's a bit functional having her in the cut back here because her and
06:31our drummer have a really special chemistry musically, so it's good for them to be next to
06:36each other. Similarly, our two horn players, Louis Rache and John Lampley. And then back here,
06:41we've got keyboard station. Our incredible Harvard grad keyboardist, Corey Bernhardt, has literally a
06:48space station back here where he can really pull up any sound known to man. And then our incredible
06:54bassist, India Owens, set up back here. In a lot of ways, she is the heartbeat of everything that
07:01we do. The first show was one for the books. I was playing drums on that first sort of feature
07:07performance, and I dropped my stick right at the onset. Those that were here in the beginning
07:13love to remind me of how I almost threw the whole first note.
07:23There are trap doors. There's ladders. There's a secret door on this balcony, and there's a secret
07:28door on that balcony, which is behind Aragorn's sword there. And so you can come in and out. We
07:33thought we'd be using that a lot too. I don't think we ever used this one. I think we used
07:38that
07:38one once. Do you guys want to come up? These bookshelves on the set here are all science fiction
07:43and fantasy, which are my favorite genre. This is a beautiful view. I forgot that we have stars up
07:51here. Those are gorgeous. It's such a huge space that we wanted to occupy. I didn't want the desk
07:58and the band to be dwarfed by the space, so we wanted to fill out and use the entirety of
08:03the stage
08:04space. And part of it was to build something up here that was in relationship to the balcony. So
08:09I could come up here, and we ended the show a few times up here. I remember doing that. Since
08:13we had
08:14this beautiful Broadway space that we wanted to open up and have a theatrical experience for the
08:18audience, and for me too, because I had just come from a show where I was talking to the camera.
08:24The
08:24show was to the camera, and the audience that was in our television studio got to witness me do it
08:28to
08:29the camera. Here, the show is really to the audience, and the camera captures that relationship to the
08:33theatrical audience. This is the door. I don't know whether it unlocks from this side. You guys
08:39remember what unlocks this?
08:41Press on your right side.
08:45Wow. Yeah, it is not kidding around. So this is an original. This was original to the theater,
08:53and so we just said, oh, we'll put the trap door here so we can go up and down with
08:57a little. Great
08:58way to snap an ankle and eventually break your neck. This ladder continues to go up over there,
09:02up toward the Fly Gallery with another sort of catwalk up there. When Late Show with David
09:10Letterman was here, none of this was being used, so this probably predates him back to the 60s and
09:15the 50s. Anyway, this is a sword that Viggo Mortensen gave me. This is the Captain America
09:22shield that Marvel sent me, Joe Quesada and Marvel Comics sent me back when Steve Rogers was assassinated
09:28back in the early 2010s. This is a banner from the Freedom March, the I Have a Dream speech. My
09:34mom was
09:35there, and she's pregnant with me. So I'll just keep that here. And that's my dad. Right there.
09:46My name is Tanya Bracco and I'm a co-executive producer. I'm one of the people who was involved
09:52in the redesign of the theater and the offices. This hallway is special because we are right
09:58underneath the stage. These columns are called elephant columns because in the 50s, Ed Sullivan
10:04wanted to have Ringling Brothers on and they had a popular elephant act. When the engineers heard
10:10about that, they were very concerned that the structure of the stage could not hold the elephants
10:16and it would collapse. So they installed these four columns, forever known as the elephant columns. And
10:23we learned about this story. We had to pay homage, hence the elephant mural in the hallway. A few years
10:29later, we had Spike Jonze on and he wanted to direct a music video with the car for Karen Oh
10:36live on the
10:37show. And everybody was concerned about the weight of the car. And there was no problem because of these
10:42elephant columns that were installed in the 50s.
10:49This is our little cornice up here with the show logo up there, the Late Show With. And people always,
10:55when we first started asking, why doesn't it say your name? And I said, because it's the Late Show With
11:00and I stand underneath it. Why do you need to say my name? I'm here. This is my spot. Some
11:05people just
11:05have a red dot, which I used to have. One of our stagehands very kindly put a South Carolina state
11:11profile with a flag on it. And I like it because it reminds me to be myself and to not
11:15fall into
11:16character to stay me. I'm at my best when I'm back there.
11:24I'm Antonia Xureyas. I'm the costume designer for the Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
11:28We're in our main wardrobe space. We actually have multiple spaces within the building, but this is our
11:33largest. These are some costumes that hopefully are going to make it in the last episode of the show.
11:39This one's from very early on when Stephen and Tom Hanks did a sketch. We created the cape for
11:46Stephen to play the Zoltar role and the genie hat here. And then this is another one that we worked
11:52on for forever, honestly. This costume evolved out of the sketch that this eight-year-old boy created
12:00for us for this superhero named Bulbo. Walton Goggins was gracious enough to play along with us and this
12:07was built for him over a long period of time with many fittings. If it gets a laugh,
12:14then we know that we've achieved something. It's always super satisfying when you hear the audience
12:19reaction. I am Bulbo. Stephen's suits primarily have been made by Xenia and Giorgio Armani. I pick the
12:29fabrics from that season's look books and then they are custom made in Italy and fit here in his
12:36wardrobe space, which is not in here. Now stuff me with shrimp, lobster boy.
12:42I think probably one of my favorite bits that we got to work on was the number one Trilly
12:46song when we did the 20-year celebration of the Lord of the Rings.
12:52Having all those actors here, just such a treat and to work on something that meant so much to Stephen,
12:58I think brought us all a lot of joy. It was really fun.
13:11I love being in a real theater with the Fly Gallery. Been here for 11 years and tried to never
13:16take it for
13:16granted. And of course now, every time I walk out on stage, I look around and try to drink it
13:20in because
13:22you're never going to get this again. Because we're not being replaced by a late night show,
13:27I don't know what's going to happen at the Ed Salton Theater, but something should happen.
13:30It's too beautiful a space. And really over the last 11 years, too much work has been put into it
13:36to
13:36make it a great television or broadcast performance space. I mean, that's what happened starting in the
13:411930s when CBS took it over from the WPA because it was a, it was a WPA theater for the
13:47people. 25
13:48cents to see the American premiere of Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot. But when they took it
13:52over in 36, it became a broadcast space. And now it's, in my opinion, is the best broadcast space
13:57in New York City. And the fact that nothing's going to come in here breaks my heart. But someone will
14:02figure something out. And I wish them all the luck in the world, because they're going to love it.
14:15Well, this has been great. But for the moment, I still have a television show. So get out!
14:23Jeez!
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