If at some point in your life you decide that you want to write your autobiography, there are a couple of very important items to consider.

One is that you can write.

The other is that your life better have something interesting about it.

Both of the requirements are met, gloriously, in "The Lion," the one man show that opened Friday night at the Stiemke Studio of the Milwaukee Rep.

It is an absolutely mesmerizing 71 minutes of a powerful, engaging, funny and sad musical autobiography of the life of Benjamin Scheuer.

Scheuer is the only person in the show, but he shares the stage with seven guitars, an amp, a couple of voice microphones and a spare set that has a couple of chairs, a radiator and desk against a wall. That’s it.

There is nothing to take your attention away from Scheuer who has the good looks and winning smile of the cutest boy band you ever saw. But this guy is no boy band.

He is a serious musician and singer and songwriter who takes us on a journey through his life, the good times and bad, the winners and the losers, and most of all the boy with a spirit who wanted to play music, just like his dad.

The story opens when Scheuer is a little boy who watches his dad play the guitar and sing. He wants to be like his dad, who makes him a cookie-tin banjo (the story of the cookie-tin banjo is the first song and immediately lets you know this is going to be a very special evening). But soon he wants something real with strings so his dad buys him his first guitar and a black pick. He teaches him the chord of G major, and Scheuer never looked back.

This is a story about music, but it is so much more. It’s about fathers and sons, children and parents, a child and his brothers, and all of the messy stuff that makes up a life.

Almost the entire story is told in song. But these are not songs in the traditional sense. They are the music of a life with conversations being told while music leads this parade.

There are many stopping points in Scheuer’s life, and they come with surprise. I won’t spoil the surprises, but the opening night audience was absolutely riveted.

Put Scheuer and his guitar on a stool in a pub in Dublin, and you have an idea of what this is.

He is a very skilled guitar player, a folk singer whose folk are not unlike yours and mine.

There is a point in this play where he talks about how so many people say they have "stories just like mine." They tell the story, and it’s nothing like his. But he has the wisdom to realize it’s just that they feel the same way about their story as he does about his.

There is nobody so powerful in live theater as the truth tellers. The people on a stage who you believe, who you fall in love with or hate or admire or something. The truth will always win out.

And Scheuer’s story is the truth. Every single moment is something he’s lived and learned from and tried to forget. But at some point in his life he realized that it was the things that happened, the good and the bad, that taught this lion how to roar.

Each of us has a story to tell.

Scheuer tells his story with a nice voice and a soft and gentle manner. He moves easily around the stage before landing, guitar in hands and a song in his heart. Not a sound could be heard in the theater for the entirety of this performance.

He bares his soul and reveals the kind of torment that can shape a person. It is obvious that he has found some comfort in all that has taken place in his life and has reached a kind of zen state where he adds it all up and it comes out ... a lion.

"The Lion" runs through Nov. 8 and information on tickets and showtimes is available here.