We’re in a wonderful moment when the stand-up set as a form is open to radical reinterpretation by talents as diverse as Hannah Gadsby, Tig Notaro, James Acaster, and more. The latest innovator is Josh Sharp, a comedic writer, actor, and Upright Citizens Brigade alum best known for playing one of the two long-lost “identical” twins in Dicks: The Musical. His inventive new show, Josh Sharp’s ta-da!, reinterprets the stand-up routine for the PowerPoint age. In fact, that’s the whole conceit of his breathtakingly hilarious show.
He strides the stage of the Greenwich House Theatre — repeatedly reminding us that we’re Off Broadway and so he’s just “trynathing” — clutching a clicker and cycling through 2,000 slides projected on the screen behind him. Sometimes, the projected words match his on-stage speech exactly (though often rendered phonetically); frequently, the slides serve as glorified footnotes that comment on his script or undercut his argument in some way — as when he recounts how a “genderless lump of a woman” on the 7 train starts railing out loud about “how gay people are bad,” while the text behind him notes, “lowkey agree with her on that point.”
Like other high-concept comedians, Sharp has developed a method that helps to elevate the familiarity of some of his confessional material as an urban gay millennial. He grew up in the rural South in the pre-Glee aughts, acutely aware of his gay identity but reluctant to even masturbate until he turned 18. Arriving in New York City after college, he was “gently bullied” to come out publicly by his own mother — who was battling ovarian cancer at the time. There are stories of his days as a boy magician performing at younger kids’ birthday parties, of massages that end in happy endings, of hooking up in the Russian Turkish baths, of recording his dad singing along at an Adele concert.
But early on, he telegraphs that he will venture into some darker territory as well: some incidents that he describes as “minor gay bashing” but also the passing of his mother and a recent incident on a Mexican vacation where he had his own close call with death. “It’s the big Act 3 twist,” he teases as the slide behind him reads: “It’s giving M. Night.” And coupled with his didactic PowerPoint format, which is frequently conveyed with text-speak abbreviations and smileys, Sharp doubles down on the show’s essential challenge to its audience: to listen and read even when the content of his texts diverge, to “refute the binary” and hold space for two competing ideas at the same time.
Dressed in a loose black t-shirt and pleated black trousers that stop a couple inches above his white sneakers, Sharp has the boyish energy of an overgrown twink. He still wears his mop of black hair in a bowl cut despite the fact that he’s in his mid-30s, and he moves his lanky frame about the stage with the gawky presence of a Teletubby who’s misplaced his costume back at the bar. He’s utterly in command of the show even when he diverges from the script to interact with the audience. (“Crowd work” appears on screen behind him at the time, naturally.) Occasionally, he steers the show into the shoulder of the road only to pull us back into the center lane. As he cautions early on, “Never believe a magician when they tell you they fucked up.” Nothing is left to chance, including moments of apparent spontaneity.
Sharp, working under Sam Pinkleton’s adept direction, is truly a magician of the solo comedy show. He studs his monologue with callbacks, punny dad jokes, pop culture references, and esoteric philosophical concepts like Edwin Schrodinger’s cat and the quantum immortality theory. (As several slides remind us, he once worked as an SAT tutor.) This is smart material, packaged in an erudite form, and delivered with the polished pizzazz of a homo Houdini. ★★★★★
JOSH SHARP’S TA-DA!
Greenwich House Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 85 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through August 23 for $60 to $115
Culture Sauce 