A Sneak Peek of The Lion

-
By Shannon Stockwell

Above all else, singer-songwriter Benjamin Scheuer loves a good story. But despite his own folk-bluegrass acoustic style, one of his favorite genres of music is hip-hop. “It’s the most advanced kind of lyricism. These guys and girls are doing things that I aspire to do. I would love to tell these dense and complex stories.” In The Lion, Scheuer’s moving, intricate one-man musical, his aspiration is reality.

Benjamin Scheuer in The Lion. Photo by Matthew Murphy. 

Scheuer is a master storyteller with a sharp understanding of the structure of musical theater. Traditionally, every musical starts with a song that sets the scene, and the second song lets us know what the main character wants. Scheuer pointed out that the first lines of the first song in The Lion do that perfectly: “My father has an old guitar and he plays me folk songs / There is nothing I want more than to play like him.” “I don’t like to waste words,” Scheuer said. “Everybody’s time is valuable, you know?”

He also understands storytelling in a technical way. A graduate of Harvard University, Scheuer spent much of his college career studying the intricacies of the classical three-act structure. “I try to incorporate that three-act structure that I’ve learned by studying theater and literature into every single song,” Scheuer said in a talk with Google. “Into each song.”

The arc of the show is built upon the Hero’s Journey, a theory of storytelling codified by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. “Structurally, I really try to be very technical,” said Scheuer. “Because the closer I stay to the technical structuralism, the farther I can go in telling my version of that.”

The Hero’s Journey, the three-act dramatic structure, and traditional musical theater—the fact these theories exist is a sign that the vast array of stories we tell are essentially the same tale. For Scheuer, the interconnectedness of stories became abundantly clear in the audience response to The Lion. “The best compliment I can get is when somebody says, ‘Hey, man, you know, your story is just like my story,’ and then they tell me this story that has nothing to do with my story,” said Scheuer. “You know, ‘My mother moved to Tennessee with my dad’s canoe and my dad and I used to canoe together.’ And I couldn’t work out why this was happening, [but] I think I have an answer. It’s not that the stuff that happens to us is the same. It’s that we pretty much feel the same way about the stuff that does happen to us. We feel alone. We feel lost. We feel loved. We feel understood by other people, by ourselves. That’s all.”

The Lion opens April 19 at A.C.T.'s Strand Theater. Get your tickets here!

Popular posts from this blog

“To Be or Not to Be”: The Iconic Speech’s Origins, Interpretations, and Impact

-
Image
By A.C.T. Publications Staff The opening line of Hamlet ’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy is theater’s most iconic, most referenced quote. What’s less known is the famous speech’s history, with Hamlet ’s earliest publications offering varying versions of its language. Also questioned is its meaning—is Hamlet contemplating suicide or is he weighing the consequences of murder? Though definitive answers are unlikely to arise, the questions “To be or not to be” asks have kept audiences, scholars, and actors engaged for centuries. Hamlet ’ s "To be or not to be" speech as it appears in the three original editions of the play. Photo by Georgelazenby. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. The first edition, or First Quarto (Q1), of Hamlet was published in 1603. Because the text is much shorter than later editions and its language is less poetic, it is nicknamed the “Bad Quarto” by scholars. “To be or not to be” in Q1 reads as: To be, or not to be—ay, there’s the point. To die,
Read more

The American Sound: The Evolution of Jazz

-
Image
By Cecilia Padilla There is nothing so uniquely American as jazz music. In its simplest form, jazz embodies the essence of the American people: bold and inventive. The improvisation of the jazz ensemble can even be seen as a metaphor for the American democratic ideal: musicians playing solos have the liberty to express themselves as long as they adhere to the overall structure of the tune—individual freedom but with responsibility to the group. The evolution of jazz music also carries with it the social development of our nation from slavery to the swinging songs of World War II. Musically, jazz contributed immensely to the way contemporary musicians approach instrumentation, composition, and vocal arrangements. It is difficult to find a popular tune today that does not derive from such jazz icons as Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk. Jazz is the great equalizer; for more than a hundred years, it has been the common ground between blacks and whites, me
Read more

A Hell of a Businessman: A Biography of Joe Glaser

-
By Simon Hodgson Born in 1897, Joe Glaser was the son of a successful Russian Jewish physician in Chicago. He originally intended to follow a similar career and entered medical school, but after passing out in the operating room, he realized he wasn’t cut out to be a doctor. He started off in business selling used cars, but found better luck managing prizefighters. In his biography of Al Capone, Laurence Bergreen notes, “Glaser’s power to fix fights earned him a reputation as a sage of boxing, especially among reporters.” With advanced word as to which fights were fixed, Glaser could predict the results—and even the number of rounds—of many bouts in Chicago. His connections with organized crime continued in his next career change, when he began running nightclubs and whorehouses in the South Side for the Chicago Outfit, the powerful underworld gang led by Capone. Glaser’s tendency toward illegal action nearly ended his career. In 1928, he was sentenced to ten years in prison for
Read more