BWW Reviews: Boy Wonder Nicolas King Conquers The Iridium

It’s good to be the King—Nicolas King, that is.

On Tuesday night at the Iridium Jazz Club, the precocious, yet polished 20-year-old crooner conquered a packed room filled with freshly-minted MAC Award winners, veteran cabaret performers, a burgeoning legion of fans, beaming family members, and his mentor and friend Liza Minnelli (who attended the show with actor Tony Danza). King, who will appear with Minnelli during Liza’s next Las Vegas show in mid May, had the legend bopping in her seat as he dazzled delivering classics by some of the Great American Songbook’s iconic writers: Rodgers & Hart, Kander & Ebb, Harnick & Bock, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Herman, Cy Coleman, Michel Legrand, and Anthony Newley. It's truly heartening to see and hear a member of the "Millennial Generation" helping to keep the music of "The Greatest Generation" alive and kicking—and doing it so well to boot. 

King isn’t a stranger to the Iridium, as last year he regularly took a turn as a special guest in Terese Genecco’s MAC Award-winning monthly shows with her “Little Big Band. But this was the kid’s first foray in his own Iridium show and King ruled, with the support of his Musical Director/Pianist and Arranger Mike Renzi, Chip Jackson on bass, and Ray Marchica on drums. The show didn’t have a specific theme, but it didn’t have to. King is passionate when he sings the songs of eras gone by and brings them home with the confidence, poise, precision, and vocal power of a veteran performer, conjuring the days when legends like Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Mel Torme, and Bobby Darin were the royalty of nightclub singing.

Looking stylishly casual in a plaid shirt, lavender tie, and black vest, the dark-haired, boyishly handsome King opened his set with a swinging version of “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon (for New York)” from Porgy and Bess, and then raised the roof early with a pulsating version of “Before the Parade Passes By,” from Hello, Dolly. King wasn’t quite as convincing on a ballad like “Isn’t It Romantic,” most likely a reflection of his lack of life experience and relative youth, which he alluded to during the song breaks (including a charming story about getting a pep talk from Ben Vereen when he was 13). In fact, King’s mere mention of his age compelled Tony Danza to playfully throw his dinner napkin at the performing prodigy three different times. If there had been a drinking game built around how often King referenced his age, the audience might have gotten so schloshed they wouldn’t have made it out of the venue before the 10pm show.

King and Renzi did cleverly come up with a playful age-related medley, merging “I Won’t Grow Up” from Peter Pan with “I’ve Got No Strings” from Pinocchio. During Rodgers & Hart’s “Johnny One Note” (popularized by Liza’s mother Judy Garland in the 1948 film Words & Music), King certainly proved he is not a one-note-pony. He reinforced that notion on Jamie Cullum’s “I Want to Be a Pop Star,” a song about a club singer bemoaning the fame and fortune afforded the Katy Perry’s of the world (and he did a pretty good version of a Perry song snippet in the process). Note to producers of SMASH: You better book this guy before he ends up committed to a Broadway show, because King delivered Kander & Ebb’s “The Money Tree” (from the 1977 Minnelli vehicle The Act) for all it was worth; a rendition that would have aced an audition. (Click link below for Page 2)

King’s strength is on the jazzy, swinging up-tempo numbers, but his wonderfully evocative vocal on “The Summer Knows,” from the film Summer of ’42, reflected a sensitive teenage boy wistfully musing about the end of his affair with an older woman. After delivering a terrific medley of what seemed like the entire Cy Coleman songbook, King paid tribute to another of his musical heroes, Sammy Davis, Jr., with a standing ovation-generating “What Kind of Fool Am I?” At that point, the set’s three remaining songs (including King's nifty scat and a great Renzi piano riff on “Pick Yourself Up,” from the 1936 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film Swing Time), were just icing on King’s cabaret cake.

While this singing wunderkind needs to fine-tune some repetitive and cliché piano-room patter, and lose some annoying affectations in his phrasing and stage manner, these negatives are more nit-picks than serious knocks. As King gains more performing experience, the polish should make the kid gleam like the star he is surely destined to become. It will be fascinating to watch how and when this performing prince will eventually transform into a cabaret king.

Photo: Stephen Sokoroff

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