The Ed Sullivan Theater has hosted Broadway talent before. The crossover between New York City’s theater community and its late night television community has always been natural — both industries inhabit the same city, draw from the same creative pool, and share a fundamental belief in the power of live performance to do something that recorded and edited content cannot.
But the Broadway segment that aired during Colbert’s farewell run — featuring Annaleigh Ashford, Bernadette Peters, and Ben Platt among others — was not a standard celebrity booking or a promotional appearance tied to a current production. It was something more deliberately assembled and more emotionally resonant than that.
What the Segment Represented
Annaleigh Ashford brings to any stage a specific quality that is immediately recognizable and entirely her own — a combination of technical vocal excellence and emotional immediacy that makes everything she performs feel both perfectly crafted and completely genuine. Her presence in the farewell run is a statement about the kind of artistry the Late Show has always celebrated.
Bernadette Peters is American theater royalty in the most literal and most deserved sense of the phrase. Her career spans six decades of Broadway excellence that has made her one of the defining voices in the history of the American musical. Her appearance on Colbert’s farewell stage is the theater world’s way of paying its respects to a television institution — one performing artist acknowledging another across the disciplinary line that separates Broadway from late night.
Ben Platt brings the generational bridge — a performer whose work has connected the Broadway tradition to a younger audience that discovered him through Dear Evan Hansen and has followed him across every subsequent creative project with the kind of devoted attention that careers are built on.
Why Broadway Belongs in This Farewell
Colbert’s Late Show has always had a deeper relationship with the theater community than most late night programs — a reflection of his own artistic sensibilities and his genuine love for the form that has produced some of the show’s most memorable musical and theatrical moments across eleven years.
Bringing Broadway into the farewell run is not a booking strategy. It is Colbert saying something specific about what he values, what he has tried to create, and what he will miss. The Ed Sullivan Theater has always been a stage. In the final weeks, he is letting it be fully what it was always meant to be.
