Inside A.C.T.

By Simon Hodgson “Songwriting is a game of what you leave out,” says Benjamin Scheuer. “As Hemingway said, you write the 3 percent of the iceberg, but you’ve got to know the 97 percent that’s underwater.” Today singer-songwriter Scheuer took a break from his award-winning show The Lion (playing at The Strand Theater until May 1) to present a master class in songwriting at A.C.T.’s 30 Grant Avenue offices. Listening to the songs of five young performers—Danielle Frimer, Matt Herrero, Sydney Kistler, Andrew Fridae, and Lauren Hart—he offered technical advice ranging from melody to rhyme, structure to story. Benjamin Scheuer working with Matt Herrero in an A.C.T. master class. Photo by Ken Savage. “Danielle, tell us about this song,” Scheuer said after Frimer (a graduate from the A.C.T. M.F.A. Program) finished her poignant number, “The Guy Who Plays Guitar at Mission BART.” When she confessed that she thought the song was “on the sad side” and that she wanted to “get a...

By Shannon Stockwell Benjamin Scheuer in his blue suit. Photo by Matthew Murphy.  For the entranced audience in The Strand Theater, Benjamin Scheuer makes The Lion seem simple—just seven guitars and a cornflower-blue suit. But there’s more to that suit than meets the eye. It’s actually tailored specifically for Ben to sit and play guitar. The sleeves are attached in two slightly different ways, so that holding the instrument feels natural. The left leg is looser so that it can move around, while the right leg is designed for supporting the guitar. “That actually comes from military and hunting tailoring,” Scheuer said in a talk with Broadway at Google. “The British tailors get it right.” Clothing hasn’t always been so important to Scheuer. His love for sharp suits came from his battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Scheuer said that, while he was receiving chemotherapy, “clothing took on this really powerful meaning for me [because] one of the only things that I could do...

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 T...

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 ...