On the heels of Dreamgirls in the Quadracci Powerhouse, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater opens its Stiemke Studio season on Sept. 30 with a very different kind of musical theater, Benjamin Scheuer’s deeply affecting one-man show, The Lion. For a glimpse of Scheuer, his music and his subject matter, see the videos at thelionmusical.com and benjaminscheuer.com. I’ve had the additional good fortune to read the script and to speak with Scheuer and the show’s director, Sean Daniels, by phone from the Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, Mass., where Daniels is artistic director and where The Lion is breaking box office records at the start of a two-year national tour after multi-award-winning runs in New York and London. Milwaukee is next.
Haunted by memories of childish arguments with his volatile father who died suddenly when Scheuer was 13, and increasingly estranged from his mother and brothers after the family then relocated to mom’s native England, Scheuer returned alone at age 18 to Manhattan. He began to write songs and to sing and play guitar in Greenwich Village coffee shops and later in clubs. “I didn’t know what to say between the songs,” he said. “I figured if I could memorize the songs, I could memorize stuff to say between the songs, so I should write it down. In a coffee shop, you can tell when people get bored. They get up and get another cup of coffee. When that would happen, I’d realize, OK, I’ve got to make that spot more interesting.”
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At age 28, he was diagnosed with stage four Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Twelve chemotherapy treatments during a six-month period followed. The day before the next-to-last session, he impulsively took his guitar to the Bronx Zoo. “I had nature going crazy inside of me and I think I wanted to see wild animals,” he said. “I sat outside the lion cage for a long time. I wasn’t sure why. On the drive back, there was this big hailstorm, nature just pounding my car. The next day, the day of my 11th dose, I started writing a song about four generations of my family because I didn’t know if I was going to die and I wanted to try to document what was going on. The song is about how all the men in my family—my father, my grandfather and great-grandfather—died before they turned 50. And I was determined to change that pattern.” The lyrics he wrote that day became the title song of The Lion. Like the entire script, it charms you and draws you to your own deep places. Today he’s 33, cancer-free and reconnected to his family.
Scheuer met Daniels in 2013 and asked him to help build the show. They used Joseph Campbell’s delineation of the classic hero’s journey in mythology to structure it. “Whenever we didn’t know what to do,” Scheuer said, “Sean would say, well, Benjamin, what actually happened?”
“He’s so dangerously honest,” says director Daniels, “that he inspired everyone in the production team to do a little more for this show than we might normally do. We wanted to make as few staging and design choices as possible but to make them perfectly, so the show is really about your friend Ben who comes over and tells you a story. It never gets too theatre-y.
“The trap of autobiographical shows is that they can feel very precious or overwrought,” Daniels continued. “Ben was game to get to the real story. As people, we’re all very interested in the idea that great things can come from awful things. Things happen for terrible reasons and the idea that some greatness can come out of it, that we can be better people because of it, I think that’s a lesson we all really want to believe and we’re excited when that turns out to be true. Strangely enough, because we were working on something so serious, we had to structure where the jokes come, so the audience can breathe.”
“I use personal examples because I only know how to tell the truth as hard as I can,” Scheuer said. “But the thing I’ve come to realize is that the more specific the story becomes, the more universally people have connected to it. Not because their story and my story are the same, but because we all have our version of the same story. You know, how do you become yourself?”
“Ben is also a fantastic guitar player and a fantastic performer,” Daniels added. “In just the concert aspect of it, people see the show, fall in love with the music and come back to hear the songs a second time.”
Benjamin Scheuer performs The Lion Sept. 30-Nov. 8 at the Stiemke Studio Theater, 108 E. Wells St. For tickets, call 414-224-9490 or visit milwaukeerep.com.
