The Lion

Benjamin Scheuer is a throwback to a different era. He's a good-looking, nattily dressed guy in his 30s, with a big smile and a great head of hair. He's the kind of person you'd expect to find whiskey-sipping among the denizens of Mad Men rather than playing rock songs at CBGB. You also wouldn't expect him to have as much emotional baggage as he does. Ben has a secret or two up his sleeve, secrets that have haunted him for quite some time. Rather than wallowing, though, Ben, like most artists, turned his pain into art and called it The Lion.

This magnificent solo musical, directed with finesse by Sean Daniels, was originally produced last summer at Manhattan Theatre Club's Studio at Stage II and is now playing a commercial engagement at the Lynn Redgrave Theater. The two productions are virtually identical in look and emotional heft. In the former, Neil Patel's rundown recording-studio set, with graying gold walls and creaky floorboards, has been re-created; in the latter, it's a most cathartic experience as the eternally affable Scheuer sings to us for 70 minutes about his two great struggles: dealing with the death of his father and, several years later, a potentially terminal diagnosis of cancer.

The Lion is a label-defying theater piece, a musical that isn't a musical, a song cycle that's more than just songs. Scheuer plays all of the characters without ever changing his voice, and yet we feel like we know everyone intimately. We're hurt just as much as he is when his mathematician father lashes out at him for no particular reason. We fall just as much in love with Julia as Scheuer does when he meets her while waiting for a train at Grand Central Station. We feel his internal and external ache after discovering he has stage IV Hodgkin's lymphoma, a diagnosis that left him bald and unable to engage in his greatest passion: writing songs.

There's no denying that these are strange topics to sing about, but let us not forget that the performing of music is an emotional act not exclusively bound to happiness. Scheuer's songs are miniature monologues and short stories you'd otherwise expect to find in The New Yorker. Happy memories, like his dad teaching him to play on a toy "cookie tin banjo," are expressed in a lighter, more acoustic style. Darker memories, like his rebellious high school years in England after his father's unexpected death, employ a harder feel and use an electric guitar. The lyrics are smart and highly detailed, the music sweet and satisfying, with several songs you'll find yourself humming for days.

Through the music of The Lion, you simultaneously feel Scheuer’s greatest joy and his greatest hurt. We collectively thank our lucky stars we didn't experience what he has — until, in one way or another, we realize that we have experienced everything he's gone through, if perhaps in a less extreme fashion. In that respect, The Lion is entirely relatable. Scheuer might be singing about his life, but really, he's singing about all of us.