Nicolas King
Shaking the Blues Away
Post Office Café and Cabaret, Provincetown, MA, June 13, 2026
Reviewed by John Amodeo
Photo by Kevin Alvey
What can I say about Nicolas King that hasn’t been said before. He is a pro with three Broadway credits before he was 11 years old. He toured with Liza Minnelli as her opening act for 10 years, who worked with Mike Renzi for the first 16 years of his solo performing career until Renzi’s untimely death a few years ago. He that has remained a generous, giving soul without ego or guile. His elastic tenor voice and vocal and intellectual dexterity with rhythm, dynamics, and scat interludes was impressive 15 years ago and has only gotten better with each passing year. He sings with an emotional urgency that makes one lean forward and attend to every word. All of that was showcased in his CabaretFest 2026 show Shaking the Blues Away, which he performed on June 13 at the Post Office Café and Cabaret in Provincetown, MA.
True to his show title, King featured songs of the 1930s and ‘40s (all of them from films) that put a smile on the faces of an American people despondent amid the Great Depression followed by World War II. He playfully and cleverly ad libbed lyrics in his lively “Strike Up the Band” (George and Ira Gershwin) and “Shaking the Blues Away” (Irving Berlin), and he continued to improvise lyrics during a scat interlude in a Judy Garland signature tune “The Joint is Really Jumpin’ Down at Carnegie Hall” (Roger Edens/Ralph Blane/Hugh Martin), during which he traded off musical phrases with music director/pianist Tracy Stark. Together, they toggled between jazz and classical idioms with astonishing ease.
But King didn’t rest on his astute musical prowess alone. When he focused on a lyric with tender care, as he did with “As Time Goes By” (Herman Hupfeld) or with his Disney animated-film pairing of “When You Wish Upon a Star” (Leigh Harline/Ned Washington) and “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” (Mack David/Al Hoffman/Jerry Livingston) that gave children a form of escape during those hard times, the effect was simply lovely. He waxed sentimental with a swoon-worthy pairing that reflected the many lovers torn apart by war “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You” (Jule Styne/Frank Loesser) and “The Things We Did Last Summer” (Styne/Sammy Cahn). He sang these with deep yearning over Stark’s sumptuous arrangement.
You can’t take the Broadway out of this boy, and that showed with two monster medleys filled with dynamic energy and King’s powerful Broadway belt that quickened our collective pulse. The first was a smorgasbord of film hits consisitng of “For Me and My Gal” (George W. Meyer/Edgar Leslie/E. Ray Goetz), “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan” (Arthur Schwartz/Howard Dietz), “I Got Rhythm” (The Gershwins), “If I Only Had a Brain” (Harold Arlen/Yip Harburg), “Aba Daba Honeymoon (Walter Donovan/Arthur Fields), and “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” (Harry Warren/Johnny Mercer). Here he pulled out all the stops, jazz hands and all. The second was a medley of the five songs written by Hugh Martin for the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis that began sunnily with the title song, which led into “Under the Bamboo Tree” followed by a tender and wistful “The Boy Next Door.” He sang full bel canto on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” He brought it home with a big belting finish on “The Trolley Song,” which took us willingly on a roller coaster of emotions that, with King, always manages to land in a happy place. You can’t be sure he’ll ever do this exact show again. But one thing you can be sure of is that King’s next show will find him at the top of his game doing what he does best: entertain.
