“The Late Show,” after all, was back back, not in attenuated form but with a full — and vaccinated — audience. No masks (except by choice), no distance, no half-rooms, no half measures. You can get life back the way you had it before, the production said. But you got to get jabbed.
Join Times theater reporter Michael Paulson in conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda, catch a performance from Shakespeare in the Park and more as we explore signs of hope in a changed city. For a year, the “Offstage” series has followed theater through a shutdown. Now we’re looking at its rebound.
“Being a member of my audience isn’t the only reason to get your shot,” Colbert said. “It’s just the best reason.” Of course, given the political leanings of his audience, in-studio and out, he was likely preaching to the injected.
But as it turned out, the comeback audience would be getting more than just funnier versions of their own thoughts repeated back at them.
The tension came from, of all sources, Colbert’s old Comedy Central crony, Jon Stewart. He bounded onstage with the coiled-spring energy of the newly released from quarantine and the grizzled beard of someone who’d been through an apocalypse or two. (“Jews age like avocado,” he said.)
And he proceeded to talk — no, rant — no, evangelize — about the lab-leak theory of Covid-19, riffing sarcastically about the initial Covid-19 emergence in Wuhan, China, home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/arts/television/colbert-jon-stewart.html
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