Misdirection is one of the keys to a successful magic trick: You think you understand where it’s going until, voilà, you find that you were duped. The magician, in their flurry of words, their exaggerated movements, and their fakeouts, has spun you around, dizzying you to the point where you’ve lost your bearings—and missed the mechanics of the trick. Ta-da! They pulled it off.
Josh Sharp, the comedian and actor best known for co-writing and starring in 2023’s Dicks: The Musical, performs his own sleight-of-hand trick with Ta-da!, a new one-man show directed by recent Tony winner Sam Pinkleton (Oh, Mary!), which runs through August 23 at the Greenwich House Theater.
Featuring a 2,000-slide PowerPoint presentation, Ta-da! is 80 minutes of multitudinous mania. Eschewing any strict chronology, Sharp tells stories from many chapters of his life, the material spanning silly anecdotes from the subway, massages gone wrong, and the harrowing account of a near-death experience. All the while, he clicks through his slides, which variously illustrate, footnote, and tell B-stories of their own. The show’s title is an allusion to Sharp’s history as a child magician, and though his career was short-lived, a talent for spellworking has clearly remained.
In a break during previews, Sharp spoke to Vogue about his favorite magicians, developing his show with Pinkleton, and more.
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Vogue: I want to start by asking you about the origins of this show. When did you begin writing and working on it?
Josh Sharp: It’s been a few years, and a couple of paths converged. The concept of doing it with the slides was something I started a few years ago, but I was just doing it for 10 minutes. And then it just fleshed out from there and became 20 minutes, and then 30 minutes, and then 40 minutes. A good two-thirds of it is stuff written just for this show, and another third is the random old stand-up bit that’s like, “Oh, this actually fits in this thing.” So it sort of depends on where you define starting.
The show is called Ta-da! and involves some elements of magic. Have you seen any magic shows lately?
I love to see magic shows. When I’m in LA, I always go to the Magic Castle. I try to see the good ones: I loved [Derek DelGaudio’s] “In of Itself.” Asi Wind is incredible. Every year there’s a good magic show and I go see it.
You worked on this show with Sam Pinkleton. How did that partnership come to be? And what does direction look like with such a personal show?
There’s a reason why everybody loves Sam—and it’s that he’s the best. We knew of each other and were friendly and had talked about other little projects, but then, when I really had this version of the show and I was doing it at comedy clubs, I invited him. And honestly, I just thought that he was way too busy to do this. But then we talked for like an hour after [the show], and I remember being like, “Wait, just vibe-checking: would you direct this?” And he was like, “Oh, I’d love to direct it.”
So for a while, it was just a lot of conversations about it, because I was continuing to develop it in the comedy club space. And then, in the months leading up to the theatrical run, he was so good at assembling our team. This is my first time doing this type of theatrical run for a stand-up show—that sort of canonical act where the stand-up comedian plops down in an off-Broadway theater for a few months. But I directed one for my friend Michael Cruz Kayne, this show called Sorry for Your Loss that was at the Minetta Lane two years ago. So one of my favorite things from that side was just getting to build out this team of designers who are, like, cool, stunty theater professionals you can hire to just make your show more impressive. And Sam is so good at that. This is all to say: it’s been freaking rad.
This show has 2,000 slides that you present in 80 minutes. What was the memorization and rehearsal process like?
As long as I’ve been doing it, there always were a ton of slides. Even from the beginning, it was like a thousand, and every time it would grow. When we were [talking about doing it] off-Broadway, I was like, “2,000 feels like a nice, round number,” so I just sort of kept fleshing it out alone in my bedroom.
And honestly, this sounds fully psychotic, but I’ve taken to learning it more like it’s music than text. Like, I can’t really see the script and do it—I have to just sort of have the rhythms of it. Which is, to me, what most of comedy is: it’s just making the funniest sounds at all times and hopefully putting them in a context where they make sense. So a lot of times I’m telling a joke and I’m just going, like, doot-dah-doot-doot-dot in my head.
And then the movement was stuff we worked on together, because when I was doing it at comedy clubs, I was just wandering around while I pressed the clicker. Here, both for purposes of lighting and also for it being sort of the next dimension of can you believe this idiot learned all this shit?, the thing is blocked. I’m playing PowerPoint like it’s a percussion instrument, and then in rehearsal we added a lot of the blocking and movement and redesigned everything around that.
I’m curious, given the multitasking and, dare I say, the overstimulation that you are asking of the audience throughout this performance: What is your relationship to social media and being online?
The truth is, I sort of hate it, honestly. But I do think it has rewired our brains. One of the first times I did this show, a friend was like, “Oh, you’re doing that thing of how we watch stuff now, where you’re always, like, watching TV while you’re on your phone. You’re doing two things at once.” And that was not at all my intention, but then I sort of ran with that. I hope [the show] is sort of harnessing this thing we’ve sadly taught our brains to do, but for a new mission. I do think it’s a big ask of the audience, but I sometimes feel that I’d rather ask more of them than less of them. Also, you can have a show that’s smart and dumb and stupid and sad. And on the social media of it all, I do think it’s reduced some of the ways in which we pull in nuance, or just hold two opposing ideas in our head at once. I don’t know—we got big, beautiful brains and you can take in a lot at once.
The proverbial one-man show has definitely been having a moment, as has the blending of comedy and storytelling as a performance format. You mentioned that you worked on your friend Michael Cruz Kayne’s show, but did you have any other influences for this show or favorites of this nebulous genre?
Definitely, and none of them are necessarily that similar to each other or that similar to this show. But I love Jacqueline Novak’s Get on Your Knees. I love Kate Berlant’s Kate. I loved the show Francesca D’uva did at Playwrights Horizon last year, This Is My Favorite Song. And then Oh, Mary!, which isn’t a one-person show, but I’m just so happy that it has brought this style of comedy back into the theatrical space—like, there’s a commercial viability to this kind of stupid—open parentheses, complementary, close parentheses—humor.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.