By John Amodeo*** Veteran performers, Nicolas King and Mardie Millit, will soon bring Their Coloring Book to Josephine’s Cabaret at the Club Café’s Napoleon Room in Boston on Tuesday, September 16. Ahead of that performance, we interviewed the pair for the inside scoop on this new musical partnership.
“We are both musical theater geeks at heart,” proclaims the Bistro Award-winning Nicolas King about his MAC Award-winning singing partner Mardie Millit. Knowing each other socially for years, it was CabaretFest Provincetown that 
brought them together professionally. King, who had been a solo act for most of his career, performed a duo show with Seth Sikes at CabaretFest, and Millit was so impressed, she went to producer Patricia Fitzpatrick and said she wanted to perform a duo show with King at the next CabaretFest—2025.
Working with Fitzpatrick’s theme All That Jazz, Celebrating the Music of Kander & Ebb, King and Millit put together their own tribute to these musical theater songwriting icons (Cabaret, Chicago, Steel Pier, Curtains, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Woman of the Year, The Act) and thus Their Coloring Book was born, premiering at CabaretFest Provincetown this past June to rousing acclaim. Besides the Boston engagement, New York City plans are in the offing.
“I’m not a big tribute artist fan,” admits King. But he saw promise in working with some of Kander & Ebb’s more obscure but still beautiful songs. “Unless you have a different point of view, I find tribute shows to be a bit mundane,” King adds. “But 
Mardie is anything but mundane, and with their lesser-known hits it worked.
Performing with Sikes these past 2-1/2 years made it easy to consider a duo show with another partner. King and Millit found instant chemistry. “It was (a) blast,” chirped King. “I love Mardie. She’s such a sharp-shooter and so intelligent, and a fast learner, a no-nonsense gal. She has great ideas and a razor-sharp wit. We got together at the West Bank Café for a 3-hour brainstorm session, the first 2-1/2 hours of just laughs and the last half hour working on the show.”
Millit and King both agreed that they needed a singular point of view and found it in the various colors of Kander & Ebb’s songbook, which led to the show title, Their Coloring Book, a play on the Kander & Ebb song, “My Coloring Book,” a huge hit, recorded by Sandy Stewart in 1962.
Mining the depths of Kander & Ebb’s oeuvre yielded many gems, including “The Grass is Always Greener” from 1981’s
Woman of the Year, a show-stopping number sung by Lauren Bacall (as Tess Harper) and a hilarious upstart named Marilyn Cooper (as Jan Donovan) who won a Tony for the role. “You always want to avoid comparing the original,” warns King. “Their songs are so synonymous with the iconic performers who introduced them.” To avoid that possibility, King and Millit altered the lyrics of the comic tag lines to make them personal. “If people know who we are, the jokes will land, and if they don’t, they’ll scratch their heads,” quips King.
King’s solo cabaret and concert career in earlier years focused more on the jazz standards made famous by Mel Tormé and Peggy Lee, which made sense when you consider his then long-time music director Mike Renzi had also been Torme’s and Lee’s music director. But with King’s childhood years spent on Broadway (he was the longest running Chip in Beauty and the Beast), you couldn’t extract the musical theater out of King if you hired a surgeon.
Still, Kander & Ebb’s material rarely showed up in a solo King cabaret show. “I’ve always loved their material, but I’ve shied away from them because most of their material they wrote for Liza and it felt too close to home,” admits King, who has 
known Minnelli since childhood, and who was her opening act for 10 years from ages 11-21. “She’s the benchmark of that material and I thought I didn’t have anything new to offer. I am doing a song Liza gifted to me, ‘The Money Tree.’ I was in my early 20s, and she directed me to sing it in the shows I opened for her. I thought people didn’t want to pay money to hear me sing her song as an opening to her show. But she knew my style and voice, and the woman was right, because it got a great response afterward.”
King contemplates how his experience working with Millit and Sikes has opened him up. “My solo shows are more scripted and sown up into this nice little package, and working with both Seth and Mardie has helped me be more spontaneous in a way I didn’t know I’d be comfortable with before,” King confesses. “I never knew what would be coming out of their mouth and I’d just get ready for the ride.” Asked if their banter in Boston will be as spicy as it was in Provincetown, King retorted, “When you are dealing with Mardie Millit what do you think?”
Nicolas King and Mardie Millit perform Their Coloring Book on Tuesday, September 16, 2025, 6:30 PM at the Club Café’s Napoleon Room, 209 Columbus Avenue, Boston, MA. No cover, but donations requested. For reservations, click here.
