It’s 55 °F at The Ed Sullivan Theatre. Why?

If you asked Google (or any other search engine of your preference) the same question I’d asked when I was in your place about a year ago – let me assure you that you’re not alone, and also given just how much attention this post has gotten lately from people like me and you who take valuable time out of our busy lives to ponder something as trivially pointless as the temperature setting of a Broadway theatre. If I’ve been right all along, I’m assuming by now that you’ve just gotten out of a late night screening of The Late Show or began to wonder because you’re headed there sometime soon and saw something in the lines of ‘bring a warm jacket’ on your ticket. There’s no shortage of Yelp reviews with everything ranging from “freezing cold” to “HELLA cold”. Either way, Colbert’s home on Broadway has an unmistakably interesting environment parameter that people just don’t seem to be able to miss and that is the awfully cold thermostat.

I did a meta-analysis across the best of the Internet’s offerings on the this matter to save you the strenuous task of researching further when you should really be headed to an eatery for a New York dragged by the rat pizza or perhaps a bar on Fifth Avenue. Without further ado, let’s see what it’s got in store for us.

Broadway’s ‘refrigerator’ was apparently not an expensive broken thermostat or a quirk of the aging building but what Letterman, the former tenured talk show host of The Late Show wanted, by design. Yes, it was Letterman’s call to freeze his audience so save your curses for him instead. But why?

When I first got tickets to the Late Show, which also happened to be my first time at the Late Show under Colbert’s tenure, I noticed something on the ticket about temperature, on the same curious boat that brought some of you to this island. It said it was on the cooler end and that we had to dress appropriately. The dress code then stated Broadway casual. I was more fixated on what “Broadway casuals” meant, leaving little thought to the theatre’s environment. It was still early into March and I had my trusty jacket on, so it never bothered me anyway.