An Interview with The Lion’s Benjamin Scheuer

-
By Simon Hodgson  

Benjamin Scheuer was 31 years old when The Lion (then called The Bridge) premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2013. The one-man musical ran off Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2014 and 2015, earning Scheuer the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance. The young New Yorker seemed like an overnight success, a charming musician with a winning smile, a gift for storytelling, and a wardrobe of sharply tailored three-piece suits.

Benjamin Scheuer in The Lion. Photo by Matthew Murphy. 

The reality was quite different. Scheuer had endured a series of setbacks—from losing his father at age of 13 to being diagnosed with stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma—challenges that he transformed into The Lion’s story. “Being able to take the worst parts of our lives, then using those things as a means of communication, is a kind of alchemy,” he says. We caught up with Scheuer as he was preparing to bring his award-winning show to The Strand Theater.

How did The Lion come to be?

When I’m having a bad a day, I try to write a song about it. Sometimes you can’t improve a bad day, but you can write a song about it, and suddenly, something good has come of it. So I’d written a series of autobiographical folk songs. I never intended for it to be a musical. But when I was playing these songs in coffee shops around the Village [in New York City], I didn’t know what I was going to say between the songs. I figured, well, I’ll just write that down too and memorize it.

How have your personal feelings about the themes in The Lion shifted since the show originally premiered in 2013?

Before I started performing the show, I worried that many of the things I sang about were so personal that no one was going to understand. I’ve learned that the opposite is true. The very things we think make us unlovable are so often the things that other people relate to.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be Eddie Van Halen. I wanted to have long hair and wear leather pants and play guitar as fast as I could. Then I came to the realization that Eddie Van Halen is already Eddie Van Halen, and he’s pretty good at it. I wanted to do something with a guitar, and I realized I’d better tell my own story.

How is musical theater evolving?

Nine Inch Nails is musical theater just as much as Guys and Dolls is. Both use music and words to capture attention, generate emotion, and tell stories. When writers acknowledge that musical theater is a methodology, rather than a genre, it frees them to create whatever they want.

Songwriting seems like a solitary process. What was it like collaborating with director Sean Daniels?

Sean Daniels is a brilliant man. If it weren’t for him, I’d still be playing in a coffee shop to four people a night. Sean challenged me to dig deeper, to tell harder truths, to say things in fewer words. He also makes a tremendous breakfast sandwich. And he can wear mismatched plaid like no one else.

Any advice for young actors, performers, and writers?

Songwriters: get a rhyming dictionary. All artists: get a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus. Then try this: Write down the one thing you don’t want anyone to know about you. The single most terrifying thing. Start writing your next piece there.

Emulation is important as we learn our craft. But ultimately, we need to do our own thing. The one thing that every person can do better than anyone else is be themselves.

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