‘It’s for perverts who’ve known death!’: Josh Sharp and Sam Pinkleton on teaming up for PowerPoint comedy ‘ta-da!’

Josh Sharp’s exceedingly innovative comedy show ta-da! is less a case of needing to be seen to be believed, more needing to be seen to be understood.

It’s his sort-of coming out story imbued with the trauma of losing his mother Amy to ovarian cancer, told via a 2000-slide PowerPoint presentation and finished off with a genuinely impressive magic trick (Sharp was a childhood magician). On the subject of finishing, it’s an abundance of sordid sex tales that fill the gaps between Sharp’s god-fearing childhood in America’s south, and his mother’s crushing death in 2010. “I want you to know from the get it has a heart,” Sharp says, sitting at a booth in London’s Soho Theatre, where ta-da! is on stage until 7 March, “and also says the word cum probably like 450 times.”

Try explaining it to a friend and you’ll be met with a blank face. Take said friend to see the show, and said face will be wet with tears of laughter, then proper tears, then joyful tears again. The PowerPoint flashes with words that guide and contradict Sharp’s stories; stories of being gay-bashed on a subway train by a fossilised European woman, of accidentally getting “a weenie massage”, of nearly dying in the Mexican sea in 2024. He has “memorised, like, psychotically” every slide. “We’re sort of treating PowerPoint like it’s a drum kit. It’s all rhythmic.”

There’s little else to be expected of Sharp. He’s the man best known as the writer and star of A24’s Megan Thee Stallion-starring musical comedy film Dicks: The Musical, once dubbed “the strangest, most demented” film of 2023 by The Guardian. One of New York’s queer comedy elites, if such a circle exists (he is close with Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers), ta-da! originated last summer off-Broadway. It began as a 10-minute skit in 2019, was revisited in 2022, and revitalised in 2024. Sam Pinkleton, the Tony Award-winning director of Cole Escola’s Broadway farce smash Oh, Mary! saw Sharp performing it in a Brooklyn comedy club and signed on as a director.

“I remember the feeling in my body in the first two minutes seeing it in Brooklyn because I’d never seen anything like it,” Pinkleton says, sitting next to Sharp, nursing a coffee. He’s spent a fair bit of time in London recently, considering Oh, Mary! – which features Mary Todd Lincoln reimagined as an alcoholic cabaret star, alongside her closeted husband, Abraham Lincoln – landed in the West End in December.

“I feel like you were sort of asking me for advice about directors, and I kind of went in,” Pinkleton says to Sharp. “Uh-huh,” Sharp nods. “I thought you’d be too busy to do this chicken s*** show. So I was sort of like, tell me someone who would do it. Then after an hour of talking, Sam was like, ‘By the way, I would direct it if you wanted.’ I was like, ‘Oh, I was afraid to ask!’”

They were fans of each other’s work, or as Pinkleton describes them, “little dogs at the dog park” who sniffed around each other, eyeing up a collaboration for a long while before actually working together. They knew each other socially, largely through Escola. The actor “wouldn’t really shut up” about working with Pinkleton; Pinkleton knew Sharp was one of few people Escola would “call at one o’clock in the morning and be straight with,” he says. “I was like, if Josh is in Cole’s inner-circle in that way, I think that means we’re gonna like each other.” They talked over omelettes, and agreed ta-da! would be their first project together.

I’m surprised to hear that they’ve only been close since 2024. Their connection seems underpinned by the type of caustic riffing usually only seen in divas who have been trauma bonded for a decade plus. Sharp is the more frenetic (complimentary) of the two; the slides of ta-da! feature “!!!!!” a lot, and Sharp is sort of “!!!!!” personified. The conversation zigzags between the birth of his niece, his new favourite anti jet lag app, and which was better: Beyoncé’s Renaissance or Cowboy Carter tour? That’s all in the first two minutes, mind you. Together though, they’re a magnetic pair. Why was Pinkleton the person Sharp wanted on board? “Representation matters,” Pinkleton deadpans. “Representation matters,” Sharp smirks. “To have another white guy representing my white guy voice.”

In all seriousness, Sharp felt Pinkleton’s dance and choreography background (he bagged a Best Choreography Tony Award nod in 2017 for Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812) would bring out the “rhythmic and musical” element of his comedy. Pinkleton thinks “directing” is a “weird” word to use for his role here, but essentially it’s about seeing Sharp’s vision and trimming the fat to help him achieve it. “I really feel like theatre should be, most of all, just an excellent reason to have left your house. And I take that s*** seriously,” Pinkleton says.

Many people have left their houses to see ta-da! The show’s off-Broadway run was extended – “Twice! Put that in,” Sharp cackles. Oh, Mary! has been a huge hit too, on both sides of the pond. Both are resolutely queer, oddball and campy, flying in the face of industry commissioners who might be leaning into safer work in the age of diversity and inclusion rollbacks.

As gay people, I suggest, we know the audience for queer absurdism on stage is huge. “As we know, as gay people,” Sharp says, comically yelling into my recorder, “it actually makes so much sense. This is what camp is; it’s like this calling out of the weird, built on a sense that you as queer people are told you’re different your whole life. So you start to have such a fine attenuation for what’s actually odd. And so much of just normal life is odd.

“I do think unfortunately we’re in a moment – I guess we always are but especially now – where people who are not queer are looking around being like, this s***’s f***** crazy, right?” Sharp continues. “A sensibility that is embracing that and using it for absurdity and fun and camp and queerness… I do think a general audience is tapping into it in a way, more than ever.”

Both ta-da! and Oh, Mary! were created with their creators’ “idiot horny gay friends” in mind, but both have far outstripped that audience alone. “I think we joke about it being for stupid gay people,” Pinkleton says of Oh, Mary!, “but when I think about the people who had the most profound reactions to it in New York, they were people who I wouldn’t at all actually have put in the audience.” Sharp feels the same about his show. “We were surprised at how much, like, it’s a mom show. All my comedian fans would bring their moms being like, ‘It’s going to be a little weird and gross and you probably won’t get parts but you’ll like it’ and then the mom would like it more than them.” Of course, the gays still loved it too. “But they’ll like anything,” Sharp jokes. “They’re some of the stupidest people on earth.” He snorts a gloriously goofy chuckle.

It is a mum show. Sure, there’s five minutes spent detailing the unfathomable amount of semen Sharp released when he first masturbated aged 18, but his love for his mother, her love for him, and the massive mindf*** that is mortality are the show’s throughline. After receiving her terminal cancer diagnosis, she “gently bullied” him out of the closet. Entering her “Dalia Mama” phase, she didn’t want anything between them to go unsaid. One of the few times Sharp turns to look at his PowerPoint is when a photo of his mother and father appears, taken following her diagnosis. It’s incredibly moving.

“It’s kind of intense actually, a little bit emotional,” Pinkleton says to Sharp. “I didn’t set out to do this, but I feel like I’ve gotten to really know a version of your family and I’ve gotten to know a version of your mom. I think there are many people who see the show and feel that way… It’s like, even though you say ‘cum’ 450 times, you also, I think, pretty aggressively tell the truth all the time.” He thinks it’s made them work better together as he’s able to look at and understand the experience as Sharp does. “Which is also a part of it ‘cos like, you’re never looking at it from the outside,” he says to his friend.

“Absolutely,” Sharp smiles. “And there’s enough overlap. Sam’s a pervert too who has also known death.”

“That’s who the audience is!” Pinkleton says, eyes lighting up. They recite the line in unison. “Perverts who’ve known death!”

“That’s sort of our sweet spot,” Sharp says, and laughs.

ta-da! is on stage at the Soho Theatre until 7 March.

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