Inside 'The Late Show' Set With Stephen Colbert _ Set Tour _ Architectural Digest

Hey everybody, I'm Stephen Colbert and welcome to the Ed Sullivan Theater. This is the set of The Late Show, which was installed 11 years ago by the set designer Jim Fenhagen. He also did the Colbert Report back in the day. We're here in the Ed Sullivan Theater, built in 1927 by Hammerstein, I think Arthur Hammerstein. It was meant to be a cathedral of culture. This was a TV studio before Letterman was ever in here. Of course, before that, Mr. Sullivan and Jackie Gleason too had his show here. The first Honeymooners were shot here. When we first came in here, I mean, I'd been on Dave's show 10 times and I never got a sense of what the space was really like. It had a much lower lighting grid, which was really just above that back rail there on the balcony. Because this was such a hard surface for recording audio, literally there was so much bounce. There were huge sound sails, basically just big sound baffles of thick fabric up there in order to try to deaden the sound so you wouldn't get so much slapback on your mics. I wanted to know what it was like, what the dome was like, because I'd seen the old photographs of the painted, sort of a Moroccan or Moorish design up there. And they said, oh, it's all gone. It was all torn out in the 1950s. And I said, well, I would like to just go see. And so they took down the sound sails and it was all still there. And so we went to CBS and God bless them. They gave us the money to restore it. One of the most amazing things is that we found out that this giant plasterwork chandelier that everyone said there's no way it was still up there, was still up there. I couldn't believe it had been hidden all these years. And it also has its own stained glass, some of which had to be restored. There were workmen in there, like with toothbrushes, cleaning out everything. They found cigars and tools and traffic tickets from the 1940s and 1950s up there. So you can now see these beautiful backlit pieces of stained glass that all show musicians and artists rather than saints. And then because we wanted the audience to be able to see all of this beauty, Mike Skryka designed this lighting rig here. I'm Michael Skryka. I'm the lighting designer for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Because it's a landmark building, there was an architectural review board that had to go over everything and make sure that what we were doing was not going to damage the existing structure at all. When I built the truss, you don't want to put a square truss in a round room. It's oval to integrate in with the shape of the theater. The dome is all bitmapped so you can project exactly what you want up in the dome. There are six projectors on the truss that project images around the room. I call these the Mondrian panels, and it's all the little squares in the set. And every one of them, it can change to any given color. Can I go through a couple right now? Hillary, can you go to the interview? So this is the act one interview. The first interview is always this blue-orange look. Next, and then the act three is kind of all orange. If we have a political guest on, can I see red, white, and blue? The old show with the Colbert report was very patriotic. And I was like, do you want to have the same thing? And he was like, Mike, I want the same thing, but I want it to feel like we're in Soviet Russia. And if they see anything American, we're all going to the gulag. So you have to hide it in the set. So if you look at that wall, there's actually an American flag built into the lighting of that wall. There's like a blue field up top, and then there's alternating red and white stripes that go down. That's one of my favorite nuggets that I hid in the set. The stained glass was kind of a find. When we were renovating the theater, we thought they had removed the stained glass. Upon closer inspection, we realized it was just white vinyl. So after they peeled it back, I was like, we have to light these, but I hadn't planned to. So we just got some string lights and we lowered them in from the ceiling. And it worked so well that we never changed it. If you look over here, we put a couple of nods to CBS in the set. You can see the C and the B and the beginning of an S over there, as if you're looking out through these at a building next door that has an advertisement painted on it. And if you look closely, you see O-U-R-R-V-I-C-E, one hour service, and that the show is one hour long. And that's what this is. It's meant to look like an old packer ad that used to be on the bar across the street from Second City when I was starting off my career. The Invader, the artist came in and put it in one day, just showed up and it was there. Isn't that cool? If you look on the old Ed Sullivan, all of this is exactly the same. All of this down here, it's like there's a time machine. All that iron work back there, all the plaster work, all the sort of the groin work there. The girls screaming for the Beatles were high and away up there because Mr. Sullivan didn't want them down here because this was a nice place to go out for the evening and people were getting their dresses and their gloves and their ties. And so those crazy girls, he said, put them up there. But if you look at all the shots, you can see that the arches, all that neo-gothic work is really close to them and arching over their heads. Supposedly, the historian, when we first got here, said that Elvis essentially performed right around here where the desk is. And then the Beatles, being a larger group, were up center. All the bands that came on would be up center with this thing flown away and the back wall would have been dressed. I'm Louis Cato and I am the band leader and musical director of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Welcome to the bandstand. This is where all the musical tapestry for our show happens. Stephen wanted a feel of a bandstand, which kind of goes back to the 1920s and 30s, like Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington. Everyone was reading music, so the actual music stands. But in 2026, we've got iPads up here that we communicate. So this knee wall kind of just as a little homage to the bandstand era. We're a six-piece band, I guess seven with myself included. Joe Saylor, our drummer, he and I are kind of like the two OGs that have been here since day one. Back here, our amazing percussionist, Nega Santos. It's a bit functional having her in the cut back here because her and our drummer have a really special chemistry musically, so it's good for them to be next to each other. Similarly, our two horn players, Louis Foucher and John Lampley. And then back here, we've got a keyboard station. Our incredible Harvard grad keyboardist, Corey Bernhard, has literally a space station back here where he can really pull up any sound known to man. And then our incredible bassist, India Owens, set up back here. In a lot of ways, she is the heartbeat of everything that we do. That first show was one for the books. I was playing drums on that first sort of feature performance and I dropped my stick right at the onset. Those that were here in the beginning will have to remind me of how I almost threw the whole first note. They're trap doors. There's ladders. There's a secret door on this balcony and a secret door on that balcony, which is behind Aragorn's sword there. And so you can come in and out. We thought we'd be using that a lot too. I don't think we ever used this one. I think we used that one once. Do you guys want to come up? These bookshelves on the set here are all science fiction and fantasy, which are my favorite genre. This is a beautiful view. I forgot that we have stars up here. Those are gorgeous. It's such a huge space that we wanted to occupy. I didn't want the desk and the band to be dwarfed by the space, so we wanted to fill out and use the entirety of the stage space. And part of it was to build something up here that was in relationship to the balcony. So I could come up here and we ended the show a few times up here. I remember doing that since we had this beautiful Broadway space that we wanted to open up and have a theatrical experience for the audience. And for me too, because I just come from a show where I was talking to the camera. The show was to the camera and the audience that was in our television studio got to witness me do it to the camera. Here, the show is really to the audience and the camera captures that relationship to the theatrical audience. This is the door. I don't know whether it unlocks from this side. You guys remember what unlocks this? Press on your right side. Wow. Yeah, it is not kidding around. So this is an original. This was original to the theater. And so we just said, oh, we'll put the trap door here so we can go up and down with a little great way to snap an ankle and eventually break your neck. This ladder continues to go up over there up toward the fly gallery with another with another sort of catwalk up there. When Late Show with David Letterman was here, none of this was being used. So this probably predates him back to the 60s or the 50s. Anyway, this is the sword that Viggo Mortensen gave me. This is the Captain America shield that Marvel sent me, Joe Quesada and Marvel Comics sent me back when Steve Rogers was assassinated back in the early 2010s. This is a banner from the Freedom March, the I Have a Dream speech. My mom was there and she's pregnant with me. So I'll just keep that here. And that's my dad right there. My name is Tanya Bracco and I'm a co-executive producer. I'm one of the people who was involved in the redesign of the theater and the offices. This hallway is special because we are right underneath the stage. These columns are called elephant columns because in the 50s, Ed Sullivan wanted to have Ringling Brothers on and they had a popular elephant act. When the engineers heard about that, they were very concerned that the structure of the stage could not hold the elephants and it would collapse. So they installed these four columns forever known as the elephant columns. And we learned about this story. We had to pay homage, hence the elephant mural in the hallway. A few years later, we had Spike Jonze on and he wanted to direct a music video with the car for Karen O live on the show. And everybody was concerned about the weight of the car. And it was no problem because of these elephant columns that were installed in the 50s. This is our little cornice up here with the show logo up there, the Late Show With. And people always, when we first did it, started asking, why doesn't it say your name? And I said, because it's the Late Show With and I stand underneath it. Why do you need to say my name? I'm here. This is my spot. Some people just have a red dot, which I used to have. One of our stage hands very kindly put a South Carolina state profile with a flag on it. And I like it because it reminds me to be myself and to not fall into character, to stay me. I'm at my best when I'm back there. I'm Antonia Xareas. I'm the costume designer for the Late Show With Stephen Colbert. We're in our main wardrobe space. We actually have multiple spaces within the building, but this is our largest. These are some costumes that hopefully are going to make it in the last episode of the show. This one's from very early on when Stephen and Tom Hanks did a sketch. We created the cape for Stephen to play this old tar roll and the genie hat here. And then this is another one that we worked on for forever. Honestly, this costume evolved out of the sketch that this eight-year-old boy created for us for this superhero named Bulbo. Walton Goggins was gracious enough to play along with us, and this was built for him over a long period of time. I need fittings. If it gets a laugh, then we know that we've achieved something. It's always super satisfying when you hear the audience reaction. I am Bulbo. Stephen's suits primarily have been made by Xenia and Giorgio Armani. I pick the fabrics from that season's lookbooks, and then they are custom made in Italy and fit here in his wardrobe space, which is not in here. Now stuff me with shrimp lobster, boy. I think probably one of my favorite bits that we got to work on was the number one song when we did the 20-year celebration of the Lord of the Rings. Having all those actors here just such a treat and to work on something that meant so much to Stephen, I think brought us all a lot of joy. It was just really fun. I love being in a real theater with the Fly Gallery. I've been here for 11 years and tried to never take it for granted. And of course now, every time I walk out on stage, I look around and try to drink it in because you're never going to get this again. Because we're not being replaced by a late night show, I don't know what's going to happen at the Ed Sullivan Theater, but something should happen. It's too beautiful a space. And really over the last 11 years, too much work has been put into it to make it a great television or broadcast performance space. I mean, that's what happened starting in the 1930s when CBS took it over from the WPA because it was a WPA theater for the people. 25 cents to see the American premiere of Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot. But when they took it over in 36, it became a broadcast space. And now it's, in my opinion, is the best broadcast space in New York City. And the fact that nothing's going to come in here breaks my heart. But someone will figure something out. And I wish them all the luck in the world because they're going to love it. Well, this has been great. But for the moment, I still have a television show. So get out! Geez.