BENNY BUSHWHACKER (Comedy)

Book  now at Computicket  for BENNY BUSHWHACKER at the Savoy Theatre 22 – 26^th October.

LOW PRICE PREVIEW ON TUESDAY 22^ND OCTOBER – ONLY R80 PER TICKET

Review by Barry Meehan…….

The show is a crazy mix of verbal and physical comedy as Voss takes us along on a manic laugh-a-minute ride in his valiant quest to conserve nature.

Ben Voss is Benny Bushwhacker, and a host of other characters:

-Benny’s gran, who explains his early years

-Skinny, Benny’s sidekick, who had his scrotum bitten off by a vegetarian leopard. “He ate the nuts, but left the meat”!

-The hoity-toity owner of an eco-resort, who gives Benny the task of creating sand dunes in Mpumalanga, so that the resort can be called Sabie Dunes, as all other Sabie-linked names had been taken already

-A somewhat stoned hippy type who has – to him, anyway – a deeply rewarding experience with a black mamba

-Riley, a tech-savvy millennial who is attending – and hating – The Paradise Project, bemoaning the lack of connectivity in the bush. “It’s tough to live the life of Riley”!

For those of you out there who might never have seen Ben Voss on stage (more’s the pity!) you can expect an hour-long show of madcap comedy.

Voss starts the show as Benny, a conservationist who has spent most of his life (from the age of ten) in the bush after dropping out of school in Standard Four. Conventional schooling was certainly not for him, so he moved into the bush to try and find a creative solution to the problem of human nature standing in the way of Mother Nature.

The show is a crazy mix of verbal and physical comedy as Voss takes us along on a manic laugh-a-minute ride in his valiant quest to conserve nature. There are some remarkably clever moments, coupled with some remarkably corny moments, which are related in such a self-effacing and humorous way that guffaws of laughter emanated from an enthusiastic opening-night audience. Items that stood out for me included his “Nature is freaky” fact sheet (“3% of the Antarctic ice cap is made up of frozen penguin piss”), the Titanic moment, and the eight senses. Yes folks, eight senses – the normal five, coupled with human sense, common sense and nonsense!

Much as this is a comedy show, there is an over-riding conservation message – the union of human nature and Mother Nature, and how we need to do something about the imbalance, and do it now, before it’s too late.