WESTERLY — Crooner Nicolas King, the Westerly native whose career has taken him from Canal Street to Broadway and all around the globe, said he's honored to come back home to be the star performer at this year's George Moore Cabaret Series at the United. "I'm very excited to lend my voice to the show," King said on the telephone one afternoon last week — just hours before he was set to perform at Provincetown's Post Office Café and Cabaret with fellow entertainer Billy Stritch. After all, he said, the United is a beautiful place to perform and the series is swell.
Plus, added the Westerly High School graduate whose father, Erik King, was the original owner of Perks and Corks, "it's kind of cool" to come back to the street with so many memories. "I was always bopping around on Canal Street," said King, the grandson of well-known vocal coach and performer Angela Bacari. "I grew up on Canal Street.
I was always there." His aunt, Lisa Ferrara, owned a salon — Lisa's Style Connections— across the street from the United, he recalled, and if he wasn't there — or at his "Aunt Debbie's nail salon" next door to the salon, he was "running to see my dad at Perks" or his grandmother, who taped her cable show in a building on Canal Street now owned by the United. Actually, said King with a laugh, one of his very first live performances took place on the sidewalk in front of the salon, across the street from the United — where the Brazen Hen is today.
"I was belting out tunes .