With just two months to go before The Late Show with Stephen Colbert signs off on May 21, Broadway is beginning its final run on the CBS late-night show.
On Monday night, The Late Show devoted a full episode to the 15th anniversary of The Book of Mormon, featuring interviews with the show’s creators and original star Andrew Rannells, who joined the show’s Broadway company for a performance of “I Believe.” On tonight’s broadcast, the cast of Chess is set to perform.
Performances like these, while always an event, aren’t unusual for the show. For more than three decades, dating back to the second season of Late Show with David Letterman, the CBS franchise has served as late night’s most consistent showcase for the Great White Way.
In all, The Late Show has featured more than 50 performances from Broadway casts and stars, offering a national platform for productions ranging from Rent and Chicago in the 1990s to more recent appearances by Merrily We Roll Along, Illinoise, and The Queen of Versailles.
Over the same period of time, the business of Broadway has exploded, with attendance nearly doubling since the mid-1990s—transforming from a localized, boutique arts scene into a global tourism engine.
For years, Late Show stood alone. Until Jimmy Fallon brought The Tonight Show back to New York in 2014, it was the only 11:35 late-night program regularly featuring Broadway performances—an especially natural fit given the Ed Sullivan Theater’s history as a one-time legitimate theater and as the home of The Ed Sullivan Show, which spotlighted New York theater throughout its 23-year run.
The end of The Late Show doesn’t mean the end of Broadway on late night. But with Colbert’s finale, Broadway is losing its most consistent and prolific home on late-night television—a platform that, for more than 30 years, brought the theater district into living rooms across the country.
