The Top Events in Portland this Week, August 21–27, 2025
Stand-up and former After Midnight host Taylor Tomlinson is at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall this weekend.
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When Stephen Colbert announced one evening this July that CBS was canceling his late-night show, it shook the entire US media landscape. In a monologue given days earlier, Colbert had described a $16 million settlement the network’s parent company, Paramount Global, had paid Trump as a “big fat bribe.” It was hard not to see his firing as retribution, and in turn as Trumpian autocracy at work. “Big fat bribe” rang like a warning call across the internet. But it also stirred conversations about late-night television itself, asking if the mode is dying, especially when Paramount argued that the show had been losing money for years. Government censorship is far more newsworthy than trends in TV programming. But if you were following the news of the end of late night, you would have clocked a hit the industry took a month earlier. Taylor Tomlinson, who’s doing stand-up at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall through the weekend (August 22–24; $55+), represented an exciting possible future for the form, until her show After Midnight shut down in June after two seasons.
Hosting a late-night show was, for the past half century, the dream for many stand-up comics. Tomlinson may well represent a changing trajectory. Her show—also on CBS, and produced by Colbert—premiered in 2023 as a radical new direction for the staid talk show, not least because she was the only woman in such a role in the industry. The “Perfect Late-Night Host for the TikTok Era” was the New York Times headline (the show, which featured games with celebrity panelists, looked like “the screen-addicted grandchild of Jeopardy!”). Officially, it ended because Tomlinson left to make time for her stand-up career. She is one of the most popular stand-ups working today, and has released three Netflix specials since 2020. Still, CBS didn’t replace her show, and it won’t replace Colbert’s when it ends next year.
Tomlinson grew up in a religious Christian household, which she often brings up onstage. At a recent show, she called out someone in the crowd after discovering he was a clergy member: “Being a hot pastor is irresponsible,” she labeled the YouTube clip, which has over 4 million views. Her current “Save Me” tour involves a segment called “crowd confessions,” which involves bringing a church pew onstage and reading submissions aloud and reviewing them with a guest comedian or two. The tour’s promotional trailer is a collage of every talk show host you’ve ever heard of—and many you haven’t—asking Tomlinson about growing up around church. Seth Meyers, Colbert, Conan O’Brien, that guy on CBS Mornings who tried to pick a fight with Ta-Nehisi Coates—they all scan past on an outmoded TV set. Tomlinson has been there, and she’s saying goodbye to all that.
More Things to Do This Week
MUSIC Black Belt Eagle Scout
8PM FRI, AUG 22 | ALADDIN THEATER, $25+
Portlander Katherine Paul’s 2023 album, The Land, The Water, The Sky, marked a homecoming. During the pandemic, she took a trip to her ancestral Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, on the Skagit River in northwestern Washington, and made songs about the experience. “I see it in my dreams / Like a whisper spoke to me,” she sings on “Nobody,” guitars scratching ahead and drums pounding under her soft-spoken vocals, carrying on the riot grrrl influences Paul showed off on her much-loved 2018 debut, Mother of My Children. “Nobody sang it for me like I wanna sing it to you.”
THEATER Original Practice Shakespeare Festival
2 & 7PM SAT, AUG 23 | MT TABOR AMPHIThEATER, FREE (DONATIONS ACCEPTED)
The 17th season of this ecstatically ad hoc theater festival winds down this weekend after popping up at parks all summer. As busy Elizabethans would have, prizing spontaneity, the actors in this repertory theater perform Shakespeare’s classics unrehearsed and al fresco, following cues in the script and reacting to the material in real time with the audience. An apprentice showcase opens things at 2pm, with the season closer of Julius Caesar following at 7pm.
BOOKS Karleigh Frisbie Brogan
7PM TUE, AUG 26 | POWELL’S CITY OF BOOKS, FREE
When Brogan was 20, she and her boyfriend moved into his parents’ home. What was supposed to be two weeks—how long can one expect to keep their heroin habit hidden in such a situation?—became two years. In Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts, Brogan tells of the experience, and how she and her boyfriend’s mother grew close, with Brogan finding the connection she never had in her own family, and her would-be in-law, who was adopted as a child, searching for her birth mother. Novelist Chelsea Bieker, whose blurb on the book calls Brogan a “fearless and intuitive storyteller, spinning the world’s harshest truths into golden, beautiful sentences,” will chat with Brogan at this event.
Elsewhere…
- Love and oblivion, and trying to see nearly 60 bands at Pickathon. (Portland Mercury)
- The toast of the town, Portland’s finest drag artists. (Willamette Week)
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