Get your recipes in musical-theater form, from 32 Bar Chef

Elissa Hickey originally went viral for all the wrong reasons.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.

I don’t think I’ve ever put as much effort into anything in my life as Elissa Hickey puts into her videos. —Kate

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Part of the appeal of creating on TikTok is you can produce coherent pieces of video content, even complicated ones, in just a few minutes. When people like Elissa Hickey spend over a week on an individual creation, it’s worth stopping and appreciating that fact. 

32 Bar Chef was a project the 28-year-old singer and actress came up with last year, after the pandemic shut down theaters and there was nothing for her to audition for. 

“I was trying to figure out a way to still incorporate musical theater in my life, while doing something I found out that I really loved to do during the pandemic, which was cook,” she tells me over video chat. 

In her videos, Hickey presents a different food blogger’s recipe in song form, riffing on hits from popular musicals to create “You Can’t Stop The Beet Hummus” (Hairspray) and “Phantom of the Poppera” jalapeño poppers. But like 1.5 million other people, I first met Hickey in January, via her recipe for her Newsies-inspired mac and cheese. Let’s just say that many of those 1.5 million people were not musical theater fans.

@32barchefNow is the time to ‘cheese’ the day! Here’s a #traderjoes hack! Watch to the end for a secret ingredient🤫 #Newsies #musicaltheatre #fyp #macandcheese

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“To be completely honest, it was very scary and upsetting at some points,” she tells me. “The comments were, ‘What's wrong with this girl? Why is her jaw crooked? This is so stupid. I'm glad that Betty White died so she never had to see this.’ Really nasty, nasty comments.”

But Hickey powered through, earning almost 20,000 followers who tune in for her playful, somewhat campy content—that, by the way, she makes totally for free. She can’t monetize the songs since they’re pulled from musicals, and while the work that goes into making the videos is involved, to say the least, Hickey says she does it in hopes of just making one person smile.

In this interview for paid subscribers, Hickey and I talk about the experience of going viral for the wrong reasons, the work that goes in to each video, and how the pandemic has changed the world of theater—in good and bad ways.

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But first ...

If you're wondering what happened to my mentions after I wrote about how the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp memes have been creeping me out, watch this TikTok. (This is mostly to celebrate that Substack now lets you embed TikToks.) 

@kathrynfionathese all get 0/10

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