A big loud roar for ACT solo show ‘The Lion’

Benjamin Scheuer’s “The Lion,” a solo song cycle about death, grief, cancer and growing up, could have ended up mawkish at best or hipster posturing at worse.

Before the theater lights have even dimmed, Scheuer strolls onto the set — designer Neil Patel has created a speakeasy-meets-living room atmosphere — and jumps right into a story about his dad, a mathematician, introducing him to the joys of music making.

The story flows into a song, “Cookie-tin Banjo,” and that’s how the show unfolds: story, lyrics and guitars — there are seven on stage, though Scheuer plays only six (one is an understudy) — conjuring vivid images of an interrupted childhood, an angry adolescence and a compromised young adulthood.

Eschewing the acoustic guitar favored by his father, a rebellious teen Ben turns to the electric guitar and some “angry but awesome” rock songs.

Reeling from romantic heartbreak and estranged from his mother and younger brothers, Scheuer, whom his former girlfriend described as “the loneliest man I know,” finds himself facing stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age 28.

Scheuer’s dad calls his boys lion cubs and sings about his “pride,” and then, at the end of the show, Scheuer performs his show’s title song about finding his roar, and the whole theater reverberates with his exuberance.

With a vocal range that starts with James Taylor, detours into Dave Matthews and occasionally diverges into Marcus Mumford (and perhaps some of the Sons), Scheuer performs Tin Pan Alley, blues, folk and rock convincingly.

Two songs late in the show, one in which he imagines his mother receiving a call from her late husband and another in which Scheuer writes a postcard to the dad he never got to make up with, deal with the push and pull of grief and healing in ways that simple dialogue could not.