VIDEO: Taylor Mac Performs 'People Have the Power' on Colbert

Last night Taylor Mac performed a stirring rendition of Patti Smith's iconic "People Have the Power" on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, with members of Stay Human, the Jon Batiste-fronted house band, and Mac's own ensemble. Taylor also chatted with Stephen about A 24-Deacde History of Popular Music among other topics.

Watch the Late Show performance and Taylor Mac's interview with Stephen Colbert below!

Taylor Mac's Holiday Sauce, the latest installment of the artist's award-winning A 24-Decade History of Popular Music project, will return to The Town Hall in New York City for another skewering of the sacred and the secular on Tuesday, December 11 (tickets). A follow-up to its debut at The Town Hall in December 2017, the show explores Christmas as calamity, upending our yuletide traditions and celebrating the holiday in all of its dysfunction with the families you choose to love.

For this second New York holiday installment, produced by Pomegranate Arts (Executive Producer, Linda Brumbach; Associate Producer, Alisa Regas) and Mac's company Nature's Darlings, Mac will be joined by longtime collaborators: costume designer Machine Dazzle, music director Matt Ray and a band of eight. Once again the aim is to unnerve and unleash. "My job as a theatrical artist," he told the Paris Review, "is to remind people of the things they've forgotten, dismissed or buried, or that other people have buried for them."

Conceived, written, performed, co-directed, and co-produced by Taylor Mac, the creative team for Holiday Sauce includes Matt Ray (Musical Direction and Arrangements), Niegel Smith (Co-Direction), Machine Dazzle (Set and Costumes). Special Guest Performers include Machine Dazzle, Tigger!, Glenn Marla (as Sexual Consent Santa), and the local Dandy Minions and other surprise guests.

Playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, performance artist, director and producer, Taylor Mac is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow and is the author of seventeen full-length works of theater. Mac's A 24-Decade History of Popular Music won the 2017 Edward M. KENNEDY Award for Drama inspired by American History and was a 2017 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Drama. The work was also made The New York Times "Best of 2016" lists in three categories: Performance, Theater and Classical Music.

Taylor Mac's A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, a 24-hour live performance that debuted in Brooklyn in 2016, was a tectonic work. New York Times critic Wesley Morris called the show "one of the great experiences of my life". The program offered battle hymns, black spirituals, Tin Pan Alley songs, blues, Broadway musicals, reconstructions of "Yankee Doodle" and lesbian-feminist punk -- 246 songs in all, and all popular in one community or another in the United States over the last 240 years. The program has since been performed in parts and in its entirety all over the world including Melbourne, Los Angeles, London, San Francisco and Philadelphia.