Paul McCartney Turns Lights Out in Ed Sullivan Theater for Colbert Finale - Variety

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Stephen Colbert Ends ‘Late Show’ With Joyous Paul McCartney ‘Hello Goodbye’ Performance, as Ex-Beatle Turns Lights Out at Ed Sullivan Theater

Paul McCartney, a surprise guest on the final episode of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” provided a poignant capper to the series by being given the ceremonial honor of turning out the lights in the Ed Sullivan Theater, a location with which he has plenty of history.

The final number had McCartney and Colbert singing the Beatles ‘ classic “Hello Goodbye,” accompanied by Elvis Costello, former band leader Jon Batiste and current band leader Louis Cato, eventually joined on stage by a parade of staffers dancing through and around the stag in a line, as the house band finally gave the ’60s tune a New Orleans-style coda.

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Then Colbert was seen in a filmed bit taking McCartney backstage to the electrical breakers, where the legendary rocker was seen flipping a switch that not only turned the lights out but sent the Sullivan Theater into a green interdimensional portal introduced earlier in the show by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The symbolic gesture followed McCartney’s stint as the show’s final interviewee as well as last musical performer, in which the host asked him to share stories about his first visit to the theater 62 years ago.

“Hello Goodbye” was not the only musical number toward the end of the extended final telecast. In another filmed segment, Colbert was joined by Costello and Batiste for a seated rendering of a song that was surely unfamiliar to 99% of the viewing audience: “Jump Up,” a bluesy song Costello wrote in the mid-1970s that was not released until decades later, as a demo included as a bonus track on a “My Aim Is True” deluxe edition.

Colbert asked McCartney for recollections about the Beatles’ visit to the theater. “We’d never been to America; we come here and people said this is the biggest show,” the musician recalled. “To tell the truth, we’d never heard of it. You know, England,” he added, to explain their ignorance of the top-rated U.S. variety show. “It was fantastic… You had to go a few floors down to get makeup… We went down there and the girls put makeup on us and it was, like, bright orange.”

“That’s very popular in certain circles these days,” responded Colbert, in one of the few references to Donald Trump in an episode that otherwise skewed surprisingly non-political. “Now we know where it started. Thanks a lot, Paul McCartney,” he quipped.

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The Beatles’ appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” on Feb. 9, 1964 is often credited as being the turning point that helped push the already fast-rising group over the top toward ultimately becoming the most successful group in music history. This crux point for Beatlemania was viewed by a reported 73 million viewers, or about half of the U.S. population at the time.

Colbert asked McCartney whether he and his fellow Beatles were nervous coming onto the Sullivan show. “We were a little bit nervous, but we’re young kids and we’re sort of full of ourselves,” McCartney responded, suggesting they were more cocky than anxious. “It was very exciting. America’s where all the music we loved came from — rock ‘n’ roll, the blues and the whole thing, even going back to Fred Astaire.” He suddenly waxed patriotic. “The land of the free; the greatest democracy.” Although the audience may have been expecting the host to jump in with a joke, he respectfully refrained. Added McCartney: “That was what it was, and still is, hopefully.”

Colbert’s final show mostly stayed away from politics, with even the opening monologue tending toward less pointed jokes about whimsical subjects like potholes on an airport runway, as if the host was intent on not going out on an adversarial note.