Some shows can leave you feeling uncomfortably hard-hearted. A few feet away from me, two women were dabbing their eyes as Benjamin Scheuer’s final number ebbed away. Shouldn’t I have had the same reaction to a tale of youthful bereavement and life-threatening illness?
Garlanded with praise after its off-Broadway run, The Lion is a curious hybrid: part musical, part folk-rock recital, part confessional. Surrounded by a clutch of guitars, including an electric instrument that unleashes cries of adolescent angst, Scheuer arrives on stage with no fanfare and plunges into his autobiographical narrative.
If he opens breezily enough with the winsome Cookie-tin Banjo, clouds soon gather. His father, an academic with a gift for the guitar, is prickly and aloof, and prone to inexplicable rages that leave his young son feeling humiliated and vengeful. Scheuer’s English mother offers no real refuge either, and when his father dies suddenly the teenager is overwhelmed by grief mingled with guilt.
There are echoes of Tobias Wolff’s memoir This Boy’s Life in the matter-of-fact depiction of a tortured domestic triangle. The 32-year-old Scheuer (who looks a little like the young Kenneth Branagh) possesses genuine, floppy-haired charisma. But the songs themselves lack melodic flair, the lyrics intent on hustling the story along without supplying much in the way of poetry or colour.
Best to think of this, perhaps, as a first draft. Scheuer and his director Sean Daniels cram an awful lot into a mere 70 minutes, the focus shifting to how he almost lost his own life to lymphoma. He is a survivor, which is what matters most, yet at the moment his personality is more compelling than his music. The show runs until Sunday (Sept 7), but he will also be joining Mary Chapin Carpenter on her UK tour at the end of the month.
Box office: 0844 264 2140, to Sept 7