Review by Steve Bennett

Her first solo show charts this success story, which has been driven as much by chance as by guile and determination. It’s a straightforward, but engaging, telling with no aspiration to attempt anything more ambitious.

Grand ideas are flirted with rather than explored. The concept that you make your own luck, for example, is mentioned only in passing, while the introduction of a statistician suggests the show could spin off into a big pseudo-scientific experiment to test her good fortune against the mathematical odds. But it doesn’t.

What Lucky does achieve, however, is a warmly enjoyable 45 minutes of engaging storytelling, which is exactly what Bennetto set out to do. Indeed, she runs a regular storytelling club, which has helped convert her lashings of girl-next-door charm into relaxed stage presence.

She also employs a few tricks of the anecdote trade, such as manipulating the audience reaction to some old clips of her younger self winning a car on the TV magazine show In Melbourne Tonight. It sets up a finale that isn’t, perhaps, where the show would naturally lead – but does provide a feelgood conclusion. That, and the special, generous treat saved till the end, to ensure everyone leaves a winner.

And that’s what this is all about: feeling good. There’s possibly not a single joke in the traditional sense of the word here, but there are buckets of natural good humour from an easily likeable host who has a nice way of spinning an uplifting yarn to best effect.

If you’re looking to pass some time with delightful stories from a likeable host, you could strike lucky with Bennetto.

Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Melbourne, April 2009

Review date: 1 Jan 2009
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett