Already as comfortable at coffeehouse open mike nights as he is in concert halls, singer-songwriter Benjamin Scheuer has conquered a new set of stages — regional and off-Broadway theaters — with his one-man show “The Lion.”
New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre will host “The Lion” for five weeks starting Jan. 6.
The autobiographical song cycle, with lengthy spoken bits between the songs, has won a Theater World Award for its New York run and an Off West End Award from when it played in London. It’s the story of Scheuer’s relationship with his father, which happened to inspire young Ben’s lifelong love of music. It’s also a survival tale, concerning the composer and storyteller’s battle with Hodgkins lymphoma and a distressing family legacy.
The title song of “The Lion” “is about four generations of men in my family dying before they turned 50,” Scheuer says during a telephone interview while on tour recently in Tucson, Ariz.
Scheuer has now performed “The Lion” more than 300 times. The theater project came about through his experience of playing in small clubs. He’d done a few gigs where he’d set up his songs with stories and observations. “My friend Ingrid told me, ‘I like it better when you explain the songs.’ So I started to really think about how I could make coffee shop gigs more compelling.”
His success with club crowds and theater audiences shouldn’t be too surprising. The well-traveled, down-to-earth entertainer has the uncanny ability to mention Eminem, Tupac Shakur, Frank Loesser and Led Zeppelin in the same sentence without appearing odd. “The Lion” grew out of Scheuer’s being invited to attend the prestigious Johnny Mercer Songwriting Workshop (named for the jazz and pop lyricist of “Jeepers, Creepers” and “Moon River”). There, he met Andrew Lippa, composer of the Broadway musical versions of “The Addams Family” and “Big Fish” and of the oratorio “I Am Harvey Milk.” Lippa helped Scheuer with a song called “Invisible Cities” and became a friend and mentor whose advice was helpful in shaping “The Lion” as a musical theater monologue.
Following the Mercer workshop, Scheuer was at a writer’s retreat hosted by Goodspeed Musicals in East Haddam, where he met director Sean Daniels. “He really liked what I was doing, plus he’d written his own show about his father’s death.” Daniels, who recently became the artistic director of the Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, Mass., has staged every version of “The Lion,” from its premiere at the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe Festival (when it was known as “The Bridge”) to its New York and London productions and now its national tour.
He’s working on a new show, but Scheuer continues to keep his performance options open. When he mentioned to Mary Chapin Carpenter that he’d be able to catch her show at Royal Albert Hall while he was in London performing “The Lion” in 2014, Carpenter insisted that he open her concert, then invited him to be the opening act on her subsequent UK tour. Scheuer continues to record with his band Escapist Papers. He used the band when he recorded the album “Songs from ‘The Lion,'” rather than the solo arrangements he uses onstage.
And when it came time to turn songs from “The Lion” into music videos, Scheuer eschewed clips from theater shows or concerts and instead went for a different medium entirely: animation. The videos, directed by Peter Baynton, have been screened at film festivals. The same health issues at the heart of “The Lion” also inspired a book of 27 photographs and journal entries describing Scheuer’s chemotherapy sessions. (The book supports a leukemia charity, and is available from betweentwospaces.com.)
Scheuer continues to be open-minded about what forms his songs and stories might take. “I like playing gigs with a band, but it’s expensive,” he says. “It’s just not viable for me to play regularly with a band. Also, I’ve been generating so much new material, I love going to open mikes to try it out. I love going out and just playing.”
“The thing about coffeehouses is the intimacy, but you’re lucky if people pay attention to you for a song and a half. The reason I dig theater is that the audience makes a promise to come early, shut off their phones, take a seat and shut up.” At the 204-seat Long Wharf Stage II space, where “The Lion” will play 37 performances between Jan. 6 and Feb. 7, Scheuer should get both intimacy and attentiveness. The recent history of one-person shows includes John Douglas Thompson in Terry Teachout’s “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” Dael Orlandersmith’s “Forever,” Nilaja Sun’s “No Child…” and Judith Ivey in Willy Russell’s “Shirley Valentine.”
Could Benjamin Scheuer imagine other actors memorizing his script and playing him in “The Lion,” similar to what West Hartford’s Playhouse on Park recently did with Stew’s autobiographical musical “Passing Strange”? “I’d be OK with others doing it,” he muses, then notes “the guitars can be difficult.” He uses six of them in the 70-minute show, tuning them unconventionally to create different tonalities, textures and harmonies and to “generate orchestral tones.” He says that sound designer Leon Rothenberg has rigged up $20,000 worth of special “studio-type” sound equipment to capture these nuances.
“THE LION” plays Jan. 6 through Feb. 7 at Long Wharf Stage II, 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven. Performances are Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 7 p.m., Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m., with 2 p.m. Wednesday matinees Jan. 20 and 27 and Feb. 3, and 3 p.m. Saturday matinees on Jan. 16, 23, 30 and Feb. 6. Information: 203-787-4282, longwharf.org.
