Articles on the Renovation of The Ed Sullivan Theater

Renovating the historic Ed Sullivan Theater has been a monumental undertaking. The theater was built in 1927 and has seen many different embodiments over the past 88 years. It received an $18 million makeover for the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, restoring much of its old grandeur, while creating a fresh, contemporary look. You can read about this fascinating process in the following articles.

© Jeffrey R. Staab | CBS

Mr. Colbert was initially reluctant about taking over the theater because he found the size of the studio overwhelming. Then last October, Mr. Colbert went on his first proper tour of the studio and spent about four hours walking through the space, said Richard Hart, a CBS executive who accompanied him. He said Mr. Colbert got excited about its long history and intrigued by what he couldn’t see up above him.

“We really couldn’t see the dome, it was covered up with so much stuff,” said Richard Solomon, the director of operations at the theater. “But what we could see were these bits and pieces, including the chandelier. We pointed a spotlight up through the stuff to show the chandelier. That’s what got Stephen so excited. It was a peek into the possibility of what we could do.”

If he found the theater imposing, Mr. Colbert nevertheless made a counterintuitive decision: He would open the theater even more. The dome would get a new life.

Though the theater is named after Sullivan, “The Ed Sullivan Show” occupied the building for only a fraction of its life, and the building is representative of much of New York’s historic real estate — full of good times and bum times — not to mention the city’s long ties to show business.

“This theater mirrors entertainment over almost 100 years,” said Vincent Favale, the CBS vice president for East Coast late-night programming, in an interview at the theater last week.

Indeed, this theater has seen it all: operettas, Broadway musicals, nightclub acts, radio shows, a variety television show, telethons, game shows, commercials, a sitcom and late-night shows.

The theater, on Broadway just off 53rd Street, was built 88 years ago by Arthur Hammerstein to honor his father, the theater impresario Oscar Hammerstein I. Arthur literally built it as a sort of church — he originally wanted to call it Hammerstein’s Temple of Music but settled on Hammerstein’s. In addition to the dome, it included stained glass throughout the theater, much of it paying homage to Oscar Hammerstein’s operas.

• How Montclair Man Created Colbert’s “Late Show” Set – New Jersey Monthly

© CBS

When Stephen Colbert was named to succeed David Letterman as host of CBS’ Late Show, he had to hire someone to design the stage set. An obvious candidate was his long-time friend and Montclair neighbor, Jim Fenhagen. Obvious because Fenhagen is a TV superstar in his own right, if one totally behind the scenes.

A soft-spoken South Carolina native, Fenhagen is one of the industry’s premier designers of stage sets, with 20 Emmy Awards to prove it. Fenhagen designed the sets for the Colbert Report, Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, John Oliver’s This [sic] Week Tonight, The View, CBS This Morning, ESPN’s new SportsCenter, Martha Stewart’s Martha, The Meredith Vieira Show and NBC’s 2004, ’08 and ’12 presidential election night coverage, to name a few.

But neither friendship nor an illustrious resume was going to win Fenhagen the job. “I had to compete to win it,” Fenhagen says. And win it he did.

For all of Fenhagen’s many high-profile jobs, working with Colbert to create the new Late Show set, he says, “does feel like the biggest, most scrutinized job in my career.” The most eyeballs ever on a Fenhagen creation was a set he designed for Chinese television, “with like a billion people watching,” he says, “but that doesn’t mean the same to me as this. This is an iconic American tradition, to be part of one of the big three late-night shows.”

Fenhagen began work on the Late Show project in January, taking a tour of the Ed Sullivan Theater with Colbert and others involved in the production. “We were replacing a great iconic person in Letterman and inheriting a theater associated with another iconic person, Ed Sullivan. All that added to the pressure.”

The theater itself was, so to speak, the proverbial elephant in the room, the great challenge and opportunity that could not be ignored and made the job unique.

“I’ve designed other talk shows that have audiences,” Fenhagen says, “but they are normally built in TV studios, where you have a big open space and you can create anything you want. This had been converted to a soundstage, but it was still really an old-fashioned Broadway theater, and a beautiful one. It created different obstacles that really informed the design.”

The original 1927 theater (which Ed Sullivan’s variety show inhabited from 1953 to 1971) had a huge dome that was covered over with soundproofing, AC ducts and a dropped ceiling after Letterman signed with CBS in 1993.

“We wanted the audience to experience and embrace the theater,” Fenhagen says. “But one of the big concerns that Stephen and Jon Stewart—an old pal of Stephen’s, who is an executive producer on Late Show—had was, ‘How do we make this big theater intimate?’

“Stephen said, ‘We have to contain the comedy in the room.’ He plays off the audience, so if the audience is feeling connected to what’s happening on the set and is having a great time, it pumps him up, and he has a better experience. So creating that feeling of intimacy was huge.

“In order to get this giant space focused down to this one area of the desk and chair, I created a series of ceilings and balconies that bring the focus by steps down to the stage. These balconies are spaces that he will use, performers will use, the band will use, marching around, but they are not the important thing. I’m using them to bring the focus down and contain the comedy.”

The balconies also display Colbert mementos such as his mother’s pennant from attending the 1963 March on Washington and the Captain American shield that adorned the old Colbert Report set. The pennant rests on one of the wooden bookshelves that line a couple of the balconies. The shelves are filled with real books (including many donated by Fenhagen’s alma mater, Kenyon College in Ohio).

“The shelves are an homage to the old Colbert Report set,” Fenhagen says. “They’re there so he can display things important to him as well as send a message that he’s more of an intellectual; he’s a thinking man; he wants to have deeper conversations with his guests” and not just promote [stars’ latest projects.]”

• How Stephen Colbert’s Beautiful ‘Late Show’ Studio Came To Be – Mashable

© Frank Oudeman

It had been 22 years since New York City’s iconic Ed Sullivan Theater had been touched by an army of hammer and nails.

But when Stephen Colbert moved into the space that David Letterman had called home since 1993, it was time to renovate the space — while also pushing it forward technologically.

That was no small feat.

And as Stephen Colbert admits in a short documentary about the renovation, he was more than a little nervous about the process.

“I was a little hesitant because I didn’t know anything about the space as a performer,” Colbert says in the video, which was produced by the firm behind the redesign (Design Republic). “I just knew that it had been a Broadway theater and I didn’t know whether we could return it to something that looked different than what Mr. Letterman had … but I also didn’t want to ruin the intimacy that Dave had created.”

To preserve the latter, the theater’s seating was whittled down from 1,000 to just 370 chairs. The idea was to ensure that every spot was a good seat.

Above the seating area, Design Republic constructed an impressive dome decorated by digital projections. The designers of those projections made sure to include one that looks exactly like the original pattern that had been painted there in 1927.

“I’m completely blown away,” Colbert says at one point in the video.

And it’s kind of hard not to be.

© Jack Morton | Raeford Dwyer

While choreographing the space and making sure there was enough room for the guests, band, and performers was no small feat, designing Colbert’s actual desk was an art in and of itself. It needed to be big enough to hide props underneath it, to curve around Stephen, and have a surface that didn’t feel too cramped or too big. “It is nitty gritty, down to the inch,” Fenhagen says. “We would literally sit at his desk with tape measures and talk about how far away he should be from the guest.”

There’s a wall of prismatic glass behind Colbert’s desk and throughout the set’s walls. Each pane is individually color controlled so the production team can change up the look whenever they want. “We started playing with panes of glass as ceiling and Stephen said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if it was Tiffany glass? But that’s sort of old fashioned—what is a modern version of Tiffany glass?’” Fenhagen says. “That’s how we ended up with this Mondrianesque pattern. The red, white, and blue Mondrian glass is Stephen’s signature look.”

The set has a lot going on, from the industrial door that Colbert walks through before delivering his monologue to the historic structural elements, custom furniture, and the massive LCD screen displaying a panorama of New York City. Fenhagen compares designing the set to orchestrating a concert. “That’s the fun part about it,” he says. “Mixing these things and trying to get them all working together.”

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