Hubster Kaitlyn has sent us this wonderful “Taping ReporT” of her trip to the November 19, 2015 taping of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”.
Hello everyone! My name is Kaitlyn and I attended a taping of the Late Show on November 19, the episode with Jane Fonda and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Last year I was able to attend a taping of The Colbert Report just before it ended, and I had written a Taping Report for it. Just a warning, this report will be lengthy because I personally love reading lengthy reports (I love knowing ALL the details). Also, since the Late Show is still so new, there’s a lot of info to talk about, things I wish I had known before I went (like where and how to line up before the show). So here goes:
The confirmation email I received when I reserved my “tickets” said that they would start handing out actual tickets at 2 pm, so my friend and I arrived at the Ed Sullivan Theater at 1 pm. Like I said, I had no idea where we were supposed to line up, but a short line had already formed just under the Late Show marquee right in front of Angelo’s Pizza. It was pretty rainy so it was a good thing we were (mostly) covered by the marquee.
So we waited for an hour, and at 2 pm some staff members of the Late Show came out to give us tickets. Like at the Report, they came around with tablets, looked at our IDs and entered our info into the tablets, then they stamped our hands with the LSSC logo. They gave us tiny paper tickets that said “11-19-15 The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and had the number we were in line. I was number 31, my friend was number 32. Then they told us we could leave and gave us a time to come back to the line based on our number. For us, they said to come back at 3:45pm and to get back in line in number order when we returned.
When we came back at 3:45 pm they started the security checks. They checked our hand stamps and tickets before letting us in, and as we went in we went through the same security they had at the Report, though they weren’t quite as strict. When I saw the Colbert Report taping they even made me take off my belt to get through security, but not this time even though I was wearing the same belt as last year. Then they ushered us into what was basically a hallway. There were three doors in front of us which led onto the set, and two sets of stairs leading up to the upper balcony section of the set. Unlike the Report where we all just milled around freely in the holding room, they made us stay in our lines for the Late Show. For entertainment they did have two TVs set up playing clips of Colbert, but they were only showing the videos he had done over the summer before the show started, like the “Only in Monroe” and that video he did with Neil DeGrasse Tyson about the pictures NASA got of Pluto. Also, staff people kept coming in and out of the doors in front of us so I kept getting glimpses of the studio which was super exciting!
We waited there for just over an hour until about 5 pm. There weren’t many people in the hallway with us so they must have had separate holding areas for people depending on where you were in line. Once it was finally time to go in, they took half of the people in our holding area up the stairs to the upper balcony, and then they took the rest of us into the bottom part near the stage. My friend and I ended up getting seats in the third row on the very far right side as you look at the stage, right in front of the band. We sat there for about 45 minutes waiting for the staff to get everyone into their seats before Paul Mercurio came out.
I really hadn’t enjoyed his “routine” before the Colbert Report taping, but this time he was hilarious. He started by having us practice cheering and chanting “Stephen! Stephen! Stephen!” Then, just like at the Report, he picked on people in the audience and basically interviewed them, asking their name, where they were from, what they did for a living, etc., and made jokes based on their answers. One guy he brought up was a 21 year old opera singer. Of course he sang for us and the first note out of his mouth was so high! You could literally hear everyone in the audience gasp in shock. Paul stopped him and asked, “Are you hiding a woman inside of you?!” It was hilarious! Then Paul brought up a lady with Down’s Syndrome. She was super adorable and obviously very excited to be there. He had her sit in one of the guest chairs next to Colbert’s desk and pretend like she was interviewing Colbert, while Paul answered her questions pretending to be Colbert. It was very sweet.
After Paul left, Jon Batiste and Stay Human came out and played a really long song, ending with “When you’re Happy and You Know It”. When they finished, Jon was super out of breath and went over to sit down in one of the guest chairs by Colbert’s desk to rest. When he had caught his breath, he turned towards Colbert’s empty chair and said, “Hi Stephen! How are you?” We all laughed, thinking he was possibly making a reference to the “interview” with Stephen the lady had done earlier with Paul Mercurio, but then Colbert himself walked out of a door behind his desk area (I didn’t even know there was a door back there!) and answered, “I’m great, Jon. How are you?” Of course we all went crazy cheering and chanting his name.
Then we started the Q&A. Unfortunately, while the band played their song when they first came out, the crew had set up the cameras. One of the cameras was directly between me and my friend, and Colbert and his desk, so we couldn’t really see him during the Q&A or the entire first act of the show, including the opening monologue about People Magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year and when he sat at his desk after the opening credits to finish his “monologue”.
Anyways, the Q&A seemed shorter this time than at the Report. Here are the questions people asked and his responses, as best as I can remember them:
- Why is the show on at 11:35 pm and not 11:30 pm like a normal show?
He said he asked that same question when he got hired. It has to do with local news. Apparently that extra 5 minutes earns the local stations thousands of dollars, so late night shows have been starting late for the last 15 years.
- The second person said she had just been to a taping of John Oliver’s show and someone there had asked John “Who is the most genuinely nice person you know?” His answer had been Stephen Colbert, so this person asked Colbert the same question.
Colbert said that while John is lovely (he actually used the word lovely), he said he doesn’t actually know him that well since he started at the Daily Show after Colbert had left. He went on to say that Tom Hanks is probably the nicest person he knows, but then he said a few more names, too, like James Taylor (who, as you might remember, was on the show the night before), and Jimmy Fallon. He continued, saying that Fallon is like a black hole, except that instead of sucking things in, he just radiates kindness. He said that when you’re in a room with him, he instantly corners the kindness market and it makes Colbert feel like he needs to take over another extreme emotion, like, “Oh, Fallon is ridiculously kind? Maybe I should be the dick in the room.”
- The third person asked him to say something nice about his kids.
Colbert said that he will often time steal jokes from them. He told a story about a joke he stole from his son Peter, who was about 8 at the time, which he had actually used on the Report. It happened a few years ago when the Republicans took over the Senate as the majority and it looked like Mitch McConnell would be majority leader. Colbert and his wife had been discussing this in the car with Peter in the back seat, when Peter pipes up, “Wait! Is this the same Mitch McConnell I’ve never heard of?”
- The fourth and final question wasn’t a question at all. The lady just thanked him for representing South Carolina so well. Apparently she was from there and had come to the show with a bunch of South Carolinian friends.
Colbert goes, “You don’t have an actual question? You just wanted to compliment me? Now that’s my kind of audience member!”
Before he left the stage, he had the cameraman pan up to the roof so that us people under the balcony could see the cathedral. It was so pretty! Then he left the stage and his stage manager Mark gave us the “When I wave my hand over my head like this, that’s your cue to get out of your seats and scream your heads off” speech.
The kid who played with the band that night (I forgot his name…) from School of Rock had already come out to join the band, though at the time we didn’t know who he was. They didn’t introduce him until Colbert talked about him at the opening of the show. Finally it was time to start recording! The band started playing, Mark waved his hand, we started yelling, and Colbert ran back out on stage for the opening of the show.
Like I said, my friend and I really couldn’t see Colbert for the entire first act, up until the first commercial break. We did have a good view of Colbert trying to run up the stairs to the section above the band after the graffiti artist. It was really funny. He tripped a little on the stairs and was of breath and laughing when he got to the top, so he messed up his line where he said, “I recognize that graffiti!” He had to say it a second time. Then he also flubbed the line about Trump having lost 15 lbs. on the campaign trail and how he hoped he would continue losing weight until he disappeared. He actually messed that one up twice and kept laughing about it. They used the third take when it aired, and you can still hear us in the audience laughing about his flubs at the very beginning of the shot they used in the episode.
After the first act, the band played during the “commercial break” and Paul Dinello and a couple other people came out to talk to Colbert. The kid from School of Rock played so well! I was really jealous of his skill. Colbert, Paul, and the other writers kept stopping what they were talking about to dance to what the band was playing. During the break, they also moved the camera that had been blocking our view so my friend and I had a fairly good view of the desk for Jane Fonda’s interview.
I really enjoyed her interview a lot, and I’m glad they referenced her visits to the Report. They pretty much aired everything in her interview that we saw at the taping. They cut out only two small things that I noticed. One of the things was a flub Jane Fonda made while saying Jennifer Lopez’s name (she called her Jennifer Lawrence the first time), and the other thing was Colbert begging Jane to expound upon the mistakes she has made in her life and her refusing to list them. They did show a bit of that briefly in the episode, but Colbert begged her quite a bit at the taping.
The segment about the app “Handwrytten” was hilarious because it was just so ridiculous, but nothing out of the ordinary happened during the taping of it.
While the band was playing during the “commercial break” before Andrew Lloyd Webber came out, Jon Batiste disappeared backstage and reappeared dressed as the Phantom. My friend and I are both huge Phantom of the Opera fans so we got super excited, and it was awesome to see Andrew Lloyd Webber in person when he came out a few minutes later. They had a very nice interview over by Colbert’s desk, and during the next “commercial break” they rolled out the piano for Colbert and Andrew Lloyd Webber to use. I had been really hoping they would sing a full song together, but instead they just talked about the different musicals Andrew Lloyd Webber had written and sang snippets of songs. After every question Colbert asked, Andrew Lloyd Webber would say, “Good question!” before answering. After the third or fourth time he said that, Colbert goes, “Of course it’s a good question! I do this for a living!” I think they cut out most of Andrew Lloyd Webber saying “Good question!” (they showed maybe one in the aired version?) but he kept saying it and Colbert would pull a funny face every time he did, which made us all laugh.
They did cut an entire section out of the interview where they talked about Cats. I’ve never seen Cats and I know almost nothing about it so it was interesting. Andrew Lloyd Webber said it’s based off some poetry for children by T.S Eliot, which he said he had just always enjoyed as a kid. Even then he knew the rhymes would make a good musical and apparently some of the lyrics are taken straight from the poems. Then they sang a snippet from one of the songs (I think it was called “Memory”?). Colbert said that song is probably his most famous song, but Andrew Lloyd Webber argued with Colbert saying that there’s another song that’s more popular, one that is sung in Latin by a little boy in one of his plays. I don’t remember the name of the song or the name of the play, but Andrew Lloyd Webber sang a little bit of it. It was at this point that Colbert turned to us in the audience and joked, “This is by far the cheapest ticket you’ll ever buy to see Andrew Lloyd Webber perform on Broadway!”
The interview ended after that. Andrew Lloyd Webber left the stage and Colbert taped a brief good bye segment back at his desk. The band played him out as he left, then they continued playing into the audience and out the doors back into the hallway where we had waited for the show. We could hear them playing in the hallway for quite a while and I wanted to meet them, but since we were near the front close to the stage it took a long time to get out of the studio behind the crowds of people and the band was gone by the time we got there.
Over all, I had an absolutely amazing time. It was such a blast, and I love watching Colbert perform. I enjoyed this taping way more than the Report taping, I think because Colbert was able to be more relaxed and himself for the Late Show instead of trying to focus on staying in character. Also, the fact that this taping took longer, close to two hours instead of the 45 minutes the Colbert Report took, made all the waiting we did before the show seem worth it. I definitely felt the “Joy Machine” at work. It will be hard waiting the required 6 months before I’m able to go to another taping. I’m looking forward to it!
November 19, 2015: The Taping ReporT!
Hello everyone! My name is Kaitlyn and I attended a taping of the Late Show on November 19, the episode with Jane Fonda and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Last year I was able to attend a taping of The Colbert Report just before it ended, and I had written a Taping Report for it. Just a warning, this report will be lengthy because I personally love reading lengthy reports (I love knowing ALL the details). Also, since the Late Show is still so new, there’s a lot of info to talk about, things I wish I had known before I went (like where and how to line up before the show). So here goes:
The confirmation email I received when I reserved my “tickets” said that they would start handing out actual tickets at 2 pm, so my friend and I arrived at the Ed Sullivan Theater at 1 pm. Like I said, I had no idea where we were supposed to line up, but a short line had already formed just under the Late Show marquee right in front of Angelo’s Pizza. It was pretty rainy so it was a good thing we were (mostly) covered by the marquee.
So we waited for an hour, and at 2 pm some staff members of the Late Show came out to give us tickets. Like at the Report, they came around with tablets, looked at our IDs and entered our info into the tablets, then they stamped our hands with the LSSC logo. They gave us tiny paper tickets that said “11-19-15 The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and had the number we were in line. I was number 31, my friend was number 32. Then they told us we could leave and gave us a time to come back to the line based on our number. For us, they said to come back at 3:45pm and to get back in line in number order when we returned.
When we came back at 3:45 pm they started the security checks. They checked our hand stamps and tickets before letting us in, and as we went in we went through the same security they had at the Report, though they weren’t quite as strict. When I saw the Colbert Report taping they even made me take off my belt to get through security, but not this time even though I was wearing the same belt as last year. Then they ushered us into what was basically a hallway. There were three doors in front of us which led onto the set, and two sets of stairs leading up to the upper balcony section of the set. Unlike the Report where we all just milled around freely in the holding room, they made us stay in our lines for the Late Show. For entertainment they did have two TVs set up playing clips of Colbert, but they were only showing the videos he had done over the summer before the show started, like the “Only in Monroe” and that video he did with Neil DeGrasse Tyson about the pictures NASA got of Pluto. Also, staff people kept coming in and out of the doors in front of us so I kept getting glimpses of the studio which was super exciting!
We waited there for just over an hour until about 5 pm. There weren’t many people in the hallway with us so they must have had separate holding areas for people depending on where you were in line. Once it was finally time to go in, they took half of the people in our holding area up the stairs to the upper balcony, and then they took the rest of us into the bottom part near the stage. My friend and I ended up getting seats in the third row on the very far right side as you look at the stage, right in front of the band. We sat there for about 45 minutes waiting for the staff to get everyone into their seats before Paul Mercurio came out.
I really hadn’t enjoyed his “routine” before the Colbert Report taping, but this time he was hilarious. He started by having us practice cheering and chanting “Stephen! Stephen! Stephen!” Then, just like at the Report, he picked on people in the audience and basically interviewed them, asking their name, where they were from, what they did for a living, etc., and made jokes based on their answers. One guy he brought up was a 21 year old opera singer. Of course he sang for us and the first note out of his mouth was so high! You could literally hear everyone in the audience gasp in shock. Paul stopped him and asked, “Are you hiding a woman inside of you?!” It was hilarious! Then Paul brought up a lady with Down’s Syndrome. She was super adorable and obviously very excited to be there. He had her sit in one of the guest chairs next to Colbert’s desk and pretend like she was interviewing Colbert, while Paul answered her questions pretending to be Colbert. It was very sweet.
After Paul left, Jon Batiste and Stay Human came out and played a really long song, ending with “When you’re Happy and You Know It”. When they finished, Jon was super out of breath and went over to sit down in one of the guest chairs by Colbert’s desk to rest. When he had caught his breath, he turned towards Colbert’s empty chair and said, “Hi Stephen! How are you?” We all laughed, thinking he was possibly making a reference to the “interview” with Stephen the lady had done earlier with Paul Mercurio, but then Colbert himself walked out of a door behind his desk area (I didn’t even know there was a door back there!) and answered, “I’m great, Jon. How are you?” Of course we all went crazy cheering and chanting his name.
Then we started the Q&A. Unfortunately, while the band played their song when they first came out, the crew had set up the cameras. One of the cameras was directly between me and my friend, and Colbert and his desk, so we couldn’t really see him during the Q&A or the entire first act of the show, including the opening monologue about People Magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year and when he sat at his desk after the opening credits to finish his “monologue”.
Anyways, the Q&A seemed shorter this time than at the Report. Here are the questions people asked and his responses, as best as I can remember them:
He said he asked that same question when he got hired. It has to do with local news. Apparently that extra 5 minutes earns the local stations thousands of dollars, so late night shows have been starting late for the last 15 years.
Colbert said that while John is lovely (he actually used the word lovely), he said he doesn’t actually know him that well since he started at the Daily Show after Colbert had left. He went on to say that Tom Hanks is probably the nicest person he knows, but then he said a few more names, too, like James Taylor (who, as you might remember, was on the show the night before), and Jimmy Fallon. He continued, saying that Fallon is like a black hole, except that instead of sucking things in, he just radiates kindness. He said that when you’re in a room with him, he instantly corners the kindness market and it makes Colbert feel like he needs to take over another extreme emotion, like, “Oh, Fallon is ridiculously kind? Maybe I should be the dick in the room.”
Colbert said that he will often time steal jokes from them. He told a story about a joke he stole from his son Peter, who was about 8 at the time, which he had actually used on the Report. It happened a few years ago when the Republicans took over the Senate as the majority and it looked like Mitch McConnell would be majority leader. Colbert and his wife had been discussing this in the car with Peter in the back seat, when Peter pipes up, “Wait! Is this the same Mitch McConnell I’ve never heard of?”
Colbert goes, “You don’t have an actual question? You just wanted to compliment me? Now that’s my kind of audience member!”
Before he left the stage, he had the cameraman pan up to the roof so that us people under the balcony could see the cathedral. It was so pretty! Then he left the stage and his stage manager Mark gave us the “When I wave my hand over my head like this, that’s your cue to get out of your seats and scream your heads off” speech.
The kid who played with the band that night (I forgot his name…) from School of Rock had already come out to join the band, though at the time we didn’t know who he was. They didn’t introduce him until Colbert talked about him at the opening of the show. Finally it was time to start recording! The band started playing, Mark waved his hand, we started yelling, and Colbert ran back out on stage for the opening of the show.
Like I said, my friend and I really couldn’t see Colbert for the entire first act, up until the first commercial break. We did have a good view of Colbert trying to run up the stairs to the section above the band after the graffiti artist. It was really funny. He tripped a little on the stairs and was of breath and laughing when he got to the top, so he messed up his line where he said, “I recognize that graffiti!” He had to say it a second time. Then he also flubbed the line about Trump having lost 15 lbs. on the campaign trail and how he hoped he would continue losing weight until he disappeared. He actually messed that one up twice and kept laughing about it. They used the third take when it aired, and you can still hear us in the audience laughing about his flubs at the very beginning of the shot they used in the episode.
After the first act, the band played during the “commercial break” and Paul Dinello and a couple other people came out to talk to Colbert. The kid from School of Rock played so well! I was really jealous of his skill. Colbert, Paul, and the other writers kept stopping what they were talking about to dance to what the band was playing. During the break, they also moved the camera that had been blocking our view so my friend and I had a fairly good view of the desk for Jane Fonda’s interview.
I really enjoyed her interview a lot, and I’m glad they referenced her visits to the Report. They pretty much aired everything in her interview that we saw at the taping. They cut out only two small things that I noticed. One of the things was a flub Jane Fonda made while saying Jennifer Lopez’s name (she called her Jennifer Lawrence the first time), and the other thing was Colbert begging Jane to expound upon the mistakes she has made in her life and her refusing to list them. They did show a bit of that briefly in the episode, but Colbert begged her quite a bit at the taping.
The segment about the app “Handwrytten” was hilarious because it was just so ridiculous, but nothing out of the ordinary happened during the taping of it.
While the band was playing during the “commercial break” before Andrew Lloyd Webber came out, Jon Batiste disappeared backstage and reappeared dressed as the Phantom. My friend and I are both huge Phantom of the Opera fans so we got super excited, and it was awesome to see Andrew Lloyd Webber in person when he came out a few minutes later. They had a very nice interview over by Colbert’s desk, and during the next “commercial break” they rolled out the piano for Colbert and Andrew Lloyd Webber to use. I had been really hoping they would sing a full song together, but instead they just talked about the different musicals Andrew Lloyd Webber had written and sang snippets of songs. After every question Colbert asked, Andrew Lloyd Webber would say, “Good question!” before answering. After the third or fourth time he said that, Colbert goes, “Of course it’s a good question! I do this for a living!” I think they cut out most of Andrew Lloyd Webber saying “Good question!” (they showed maybe one in the aired version?) but he kept saying it and Colbert would pull a funny face every time he did, which made us all laugh.
They did cut an entire section out of the interview where they talked about Cats. I’ve never seen Cats and I know almost nothing about it so it was interesting. Andrew Lloyd Webber said it’s based off some poetry for children by T.S Eliot, which he said he had just always enjoyed as a kid. Even then he knew the rhymes would make a good musical and apparently some of the lyrics are taken straight from the poems. Then they sang a snippet from one of the songs (I think it was called “Memory”?). Colbert said that song is probably his most famous song, but Andrew Lloyd Webber argued with Colbert saying that there’s another song that’s more popular, one that is sung in Latin by a little boy in one of his plays. I don’t remember the name of the song or the name of the play, but Andrew Lloyd Webber sang a little bit of it. It was at this point that Colbert turned to us in the audience and joked, “This is by far the cheapest ticket you’ll ever buy to see Andrew Lloyd Webber perform on Broadway!”
The interview ended after that. Andrew Lloyd Webber left the stage and Colbert taped a brief good bye segment back at his desk. The band played him out as he left, then they continued playing into the audience and out the doors back into the hallway where we had waited for the show. We could hear them playing in the hallway for quite a while and I wanted to meet them, but since we were near the front close to the stage it took a long time to get out of the studio behind the crowds of people and the band was gone by the time we got there.
Over all, I had an absolutely amazing time. It was such a blast, and I love watching Colbert perform. I enjoyed this taping way more than the Report taping, I think because Colbert was able to be more relaxed and himself for the Late Show instead of trying to focus on staying in character. Also, the fact that this taping took longer, close to two hours instead of the 45 minutes the Colbert Report took, made all the waiting we did before the show seem worth it. I definitely felt the “Joy Machine” at work. It will be hard waiting the required 6 months before I’m able to go to another taping. I’m looking forward to it!