Late-night Variety Show “After Curfew” Celebrates Second Season

It was the evening of April 23, and people bustled in the darkened, echoey event space, testing microphones, positioning props and practicing dialogues.

In a few hours, the audience would stream in to fill the seats and the cameras would go live. It was the second episode of the second season of “After Curfew,” Liberty’s very own late-night variety show, filmed before a live audience.

“It’s a mix of SNL and ‘Jimmy Fallon,’ a YouTube series and coffeehouse,” said Stephen Cook, a founder of the series and its showrunner. “We have the hosts, we have the sketches on stage, we have the videos and so it all comes together. We try to do something a little bit new.”

From Convocation to construction to ring by spring — if it is a staple of life at college, and especially if it is a quirk of Liberty, then “After Curfew” will have a good laugh at it.

For Cook, the idea of “After Curfew” was planted when he had the opportunity to help write the script for Christmas Convocation his freshman year.

“I thought, this is so fun and it brings students so much joy, we should to do this more often,” Cook said. “It stemmed from there. I got eight people together and said, ‘Hey, let’s write a pilot episode and pitch it to Liberty and see if they want in.”

Liberty initially loved the idea, but the partnership with the Office of Spiritual Development fell through when they were uncomfortable with some of the content. The small team thought they still had something great and continued without university affiliation.

Cook said the difficulty of comedy is in determining what will offend and what will amuse.

“My goal is never to make someone hurt by what we do,” Cook said. “But we do want to push the envelope a little bit, to have that edge to make people laugh.”

According to Cook, one of the funniest surprises of the show was the audience’s reaction to a particular cast member. For a segment called, “Have You Ever Wondered?” one student would wear a mailman outfit, replete with messenger bag and short shorts, to deliver mail to the hosts.

“We expected it to be just someone who brought the mail out, not a big deal,” Cook said. “The loudest claps we got from the audience, on any night, was when T.J. Scott walked on stage, and I think it was because of his legs, honestly. He hated it so much, but he got the loudest claps every week.”

“After Curfew” has grown and evolved since it began. It is officially registered as a nonprofit and has some local sponsors (perhaps none match the sponsor of that first episode—a creamery who brought a live calf on stage). The cast and crew has multiplied from the original handful to around 100, all student and alumni—camera crew, editing team, social media team and graphic design team among others.

This year the crew is bringing back some old favorites, such as the essential oils lady while introducing plenty of new entertainment. They are consciously reducing the number of “youth group-style” games, as Cook called them, and choosing to focus on comedy skits and special guests. They are also upping the pressure by streaming all three of this season’s episodes live on Facebook.

“Before, we would tape it in front of a live studio audience and our editing team would take a week to edit it and then premiere it,” Cook said. “But this season we actually have a broadcasting team which is broadcasting it tonight, live on our Facebook page as we do it. It definitely adds an element of risk for the team.”

At the event space Monday night, the show commenced with only a couple technical hiccups, soon fixed. The audience was treated to “Frat House Hunters,” a sales pitch for some outrageous essential oils, and more. The show concluded with a performance from special guest Dryden Glod, a sophomore at Liberty who wowed the crowd with “America’s Got Talent”-worthy magic tricks.

Cook is graduating this May, but he hopes the show will not stop any time soon.

“We’re hoping to have some students take over the show for us in the future,” Cook said. “I don’t want it to be my show. I want it to be its own entity, for it to continue on from what we have so far.”

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