UPDATED with video: This year’s Grammy Awards host James Corden made quite an entrance tonight.
Adele actually opened the ceremony, performing “Hello” after which Corden, sartorially splendid in a white dinner jacket, rose through the floor and up to the top of a giant illuminated staircase, only the mechanical lift failed, so he had to climb the last bit. As the CBS late-night host began to descend the staircase, he fell through a riser. Climbing back up onto the stairs, he performed a pratfall, rolling to the bottom. Picking himself up, Corden seemed to have lost one shoe and, nearly, his pants.
Grammy crowd, who typically take themselves and this ceremony very seriously, seemed very amused, if slightly confused initially, especially after five consecutive years of LL Cool J hosting the show, including one year in which he’d opened with a prayer, the evening after Whitney Houston had been found dead in her room at the Beverly Hilton hotel.
“Stop Stop Stop it! I said stop!” Corden shrieked at his production-number dancers. “This is a disaster. What has happened people?! We have rehearsed this and rehearsed this and rehearsed this!”
“We cannot allow this sort of mistakes! Can we?! This is the Grammys people. isn’t it?!”
Corden began to wax poetic:
Adele kicked it off,
sang a big song.
I fell down the stairs
and I knew all along
I’m in over my head.
Just not that strong.
I’m at 12:30,
primetime is just wrong!
And for the record, it took nine whole minutes for the first President Donald Trump reference of this trophy show, as Corden quipped in verse:
Live it all up
because this is the best.
And with President Trump
we don’t know what comes next!