It’s titled, “Things I Know Now…” and Nikki McCallum will teach you everything she wished she’d learned before reaching adulthood, in song.
McCallum described the show and said, “It’s an hour of stand-up comedy infused with original comedy songs.”
I love this kind of comedy so I’m really hoping to make the show. I’ve seen comedians do songs with a guitar but MacCallum’s is even more original since she plays piano. MacCallum, 38, has been doing stand-up for four years but has been playing the piano since she was 6.
She said, “My mom was my piano teacher growing up and she literally let me quit every extracurricular activity except the piano and I absolutely hated playing piano. It gave me massive performance anxiety and I hated practicing. We used to get in the biggest fights because she always knew when I wasn’t practicing (which was most of the time) because I lived with her. One time I tried to fake a sprained finger to get out of playing in a piano recital and my mom called my bluff and made me play anyway. I remember after one of our biggest fights she said: ‘You will not quit the piano and one day you will thank me’ … Thanks, mom.”
MacCallum’s always been around music. Besides her mother, both her grandfather and uncle were jazz pianists. She grew up in Hamilton, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. She sang in choirs and did musicals as well as a ton of theatre. She and I have something in common, we both played the clarinet in the school band and both sucked at it. I still have mine but her parents gave hers away to Goodwill.
MacCallum’s background is in performance and she went on to NYU for musical theatre. She auditioned for a lot of shows and did book some but it was getting grueling. She said, “They call it ‘sixteen bars’ in the Broadway circuit for auditions where you get to just sing 16 bars, which is less than 30 seconds of music. I found auditioning was about singing a song the way someone else did it. I was getting frustrated and unfulfilled so I took a step back from performing for a little bit and started writing. I actually co-wrote the script for a musical that ran on Off-Broadway for a while and I took several years and wrote a book, in 2019.”
That musical is “Matchmaker Matchmaker I’m Willing to Settle!” which she collaborated with Brandon James Gwinn (who wrote the music) and Kelvin Moon Loh (co-writer). It was a musical about internet dating, premiered in 2012 and ran in Boston and New York. Her book is called “Dry Run.”
MacCallum found stand-up comedy while she was writing because she realized she missed performing. She said, “Stand-up comedy was the perfect marriage of performing and writing. I loved doing my own stuff.”
Everyone I interview tells me their first show was not amazing andMacCallum was no exception since she said she tried to block them out. Her first show was at Dangerfield’s in New York, which is now closed.
She said, “Some of the best advice I ever got was don’t afraid to be bad.”
You’ll find out she’s not. MacCallum performs all over but mostly in New York.
MacCallum said ideas for songs always pop in her head but she always writes the lyrics first. Very rarely does the melody come first. She tries to dedicate time for writing but it never seems to work out that way. She may be on a run or out and about so she tries to jot it down in a notebook. If she’s still thinking about it days later, she’ll dedicate time to fully write it. The theme of her songs vary but she said all the songs in her show here on Nov. 5 have a lesson in them.
She’s created and starred in three one-woman comedic cabarets in New York, two of which garnered MAC Award nominations which are presented annually to honor achievements in cabaret, comedy and jazz. Those three were all directed by Loh. This show is her first with all original music. Her favorite song in the show is “Cleanse,” which is about the first time she went on a juice cleanse.
Some of her comedic influences include Rachel Bloom who does it all like her: actor, comedian, musician. She also loves Tig Notaro and Beth Stelling.
MacCallum thanks Matt Vita of the Woolen Mill Comedy Club as this show was his idea and would not have been created had he not given her a deadline.
Her Instagram handle is @nikkimacncheese, that’s where she mainly posts from. She’s trying to do more TikTok and gain followers and that is the same @nikkimacncheese. You also see a great variety of material on her website: nikki-maccallum.com. This is a show not to be missed. Nikki MacCallum loves bringing humor to things people are afraid to talk about but we’re all experiencing. She said, “Not to be cliche but I love making people laugh. I love turning tragedy into comedy.”
