Josh Sharp in ta-da!. Photo: Emilio Madrid

Josh Sharp wants to make very sure you apply the right label to the show he’s engaged in: this is theater, verifiably Off Broadway. “Stand up is bullshit,” he says. The evening we’re sharing is not “casual,” “conversational,” or “spontaneous”–Sharp wrote every word and memorized every word and, not for nothing, constructed a 2,000-slide PowerPoint presentation that the script runs alongside. (Most of the slides are just type, sometimes lightly animated type; there’s a few photos and video clips marking some key moments.) 

The precision of Josh Sharp’s ta-da! feels intentionally engineered to keep reminding us of its, well, intentionality: Not only is Sharp not giving you a pretense of spontaneous conversation, but he’s going to constantly remind you that this object he’s created comprises 2,000 slides, which he’ll count down for us periodically. (The projection designer Stivo Arnoczy gets a co-credit.) He’ll even include some slides that are screenshots of the slide show, like an endless double reflection in a metatheatrical dressing room. “I am in the room also,” Sharp repeats at a few points: not only are we in this together, but he can see us seeing him. He knows how we’re reacting because he can see us reacting–but also because he did this show, just like this, yesterday and the day before, and saw how audiences reacted then. It’s all memorized; it’s all rehearsed, and the very insistence on that dynamic means it should be no surprise, really, when the show ultimately detours into interrogating the meaning of memory, of how we use it and relate to it. We move ever forward through time–2,000 slides worth, counted off second by second–but also, this is an event that has happened before and will happen again. And it’s an event that will ultimately lead us to think about the nature of time and what we choose to do with the span we’ve been given. Time is linear–“That’s how time works, doll. It’s a line,” says Sharp–but maybe in the theater it’s just a little bit multiversal, too.

It’s pretty meta for a not-stand-up-but-still-comedy monologue that also includes a thought experiment about whether straight guys get erections as easily as gay ones; a riff about requiring a license to operate a gold umbrella; a run of vaguely obscene fake names like Olivia Peepee that would amuse your average 11-year-old boy; and an awful lot of Word art. Or, you could say, it’s actually not particularly meta at all for a show that takes us through some pretty solid introductory coursework on quantum physics, Schrodinger’s Cat, and the many-universe theory of quantum entanglement in the service of discussing his mother’s death and his own near-death experience. Sharp is aiming for a pretty tricky balance of raunch and pathos, of camp and philosophy, and director Sam Pinkleton has helped Sharp craft a persona that can contain all the elements needed to make this work.

The production values are as simple as they come–the whole thing is played on a narrow slice of stage in front of the giant screen, though we do get a few magic tricks, courtesy of magic consultant Skylar Fox. Among the other nuggets of nerdy childhood that Sharp shares with us in this show, we learn that he was a child magician, though the main purpose of including that information in the show is to build an opening for the genuine stage magic that will follow–still tied in to those slides, though. 

The slides are a structural gimmick to be sure, but ta-da! never pretends otherwise. Running down a riff  then pivoting smoothly to emotional disclosure, the show does sometimes feel as if it’s dangling the bait of its own sincerity before you, then snatching it away like Lucy’s football with a reminder of its own construction: here’s the act 2 turn; here’s the act 3 twist. Sharp warns us to never believe a magician who says he’s fucked up a trick, which of course means we have to wait to see if a magician is going to fuck up a trick. (I won’t spoiler that bit for you.) 

There’s a little bit of having one’s cake and eating it too, here: a big slab of comedy marbled with a coming out narrative, a family tragedy narrative, a philosophical inquiry into the meaning of life, AND a few magic tricks. But once you’ve called attention, multiple times, to the fact that we need to move through 2,000 slides at the pace of one every 2.4 seconds, you’ve committed to a particular species of breakneck maximalism, and there’s a lot of fun to be had watching Sharp move through the structure that he and Pinkleton have built.