Oz Pearlman — Netflix Special Live Taping at Brooklyn Paramount

Everything else on the entertainment calendar for the World Cup window can be described in advance. The setlists are known, the artists are familiar, the productions are built. Benson Boone delivers "Beautiful Things." Bon Jovi at MSG delivers "Livin' on a Prayer." These are excellent experiences. They are not unpredictable ones. Oz Pearlman at Brooklyn Paramount on July 16 is something different.

Pearlman's credentials are straightforward. He finished as a finalist on NBC's America's Got Talent. He has since built one of the most successful mentalism careers in the country — corporate events, headline theater engagements, private performances, a television track record. His particular expertise is close-up work: the reading of audience members, the prediction of choices that haven't been made yet, the revelation of information that has no logical path from person to performer. This material, scaled to a theater of nearly 3,000 people, requires craft to make work at every seat.

What a mentalism show feels like as a live experience is genuinely unlike anything else on this list. There are no instruments, no dancers, no LED production walls, no setlist. There is a performer, an audience, and a series of things that happen that cannot be adequately explained after the fact. The emotional register — delight, unease, wonder, the slightly uncomfortable feeling of having one's certainties about perception and privacy rattled — is something that people who have attended tend to describe at length.

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The Netflix taping context adds a critical layer. The audience at Brooklyn Paramount on July 16 will not simply be watching a show. They will be becoming part of a finished product that will be seen by millions globally. Reactions will be captured. Audience members who participate will be on screen. The knowledge of being recorded changes the energy of a room in subtle ways.

July 16 at 9pm — three days before the World Cup Final, the knockout stage in its final hours, the city at maximum energy — is the kind of evening that makes the final stretch of the tournament feel like what it is: one of the great sustained occasions in the life of the city. There is one live taping. One audience. One Netflix special. The Paramount on July 16 is a room in which something unrepeatable will happen. See all Brooklyn Paramount events in the complete NYC venue calendar.

Get Oz Pearlman Netflix Taping Tickets — Brooklyn Paramount →

July 16, 9pm — official Ticketmaster