Film Review: Five Minute Call Is All Killer, No Filler

★★★★½

Imagine a workplace where job security is never a given and largely out of your own hands. Where the very attainment of that security (however impermanent) relies upon doing the exact same thing, in exactly the same way, night after night after night.

Now overlay that with personal insecurity, ego and thwarted ambition. And make it ‘stone the bloody crows’ hilarious. Welcome to Five Minute Call.

Created and written by musical theatre legends Helen Dallimore and Simon Burke AO, Five Minute Call is a compilation of eight brief episodes, all set in a dressing room during the last five minutes before the show begins. The ‘show’ is a successful Australian musical, Ray Meagher Presents The Shiralee: The Musical, a low-brow crowd-pleaser that will not die.

Dallimore plays Helen Barrymore, a forthright theatre veteran who is anxiously trying to hold off a head cold and her much younger understudy Nicole (an excellent Jessica Spies). At the five minute call each night, in drops best friend and co-star Simon Drew (Burke), who is looking to Hollywood as an exit strategy (more last-chance saloon) and is screen-testing for a sci-fi series.

The chemistry fizzes on the back of clever writing and razor sharp timing Image supplied

Five Minute Call follows a deliberate formula. Each night/episode has a familiar cadence – the bitchiness, the panic, the ego-massaging, and the frump of ennui that comes with a long-running production. Each episode also brings a new visitor, a new crisis.

Much of the humour derives from juxtaposing the precarious reality of theatre life with an illusion which the performers are both selling and buying. And the script is all killer, no filler.

Dallimore’s Barrymore has the best lines, brutal and unsparing, even with herself; dispensing vulgarities with delicious glee. Simon Burke plays Drew as a perfect foil. He’s self-absorbed and insecure, but also self-deprecatingly lovable. Their chemistry fizzes on the back of clever writing and razor-sharp timing.

Director Ainslie Clouston keeps the dialogue tight and snappy, and the movement in a confined space, graceful.

Regular dressing room visitors include Company Manager Tinkerbell (Genevieve Lemon, Sister Act The Musical), the Baa Baas – Barbara (Chaska Halliday, The Lion King) and Barnaby (Joel Granger, Phar Lap: The Electro-Swing Musical) in sheep costume, and musical director Belinda (Catherine Vān-Davies, STC’s The Shiralee). They are all fabulous.

Theres a brittleness and a tenderness in all the characters Image supplied

The series features cameos from well-known actors and industry professionals, some playing amplified versions of themselves. Though the performances from the non-actors are variable, Trevor Ashley (The Producers, West End production) as Winston T Ford from WTF Management is a hoot, while Georgie Parker (as her Logie-winning self) clearly relishes delivering one-upmanship and fat-shaming in the same breath.

There’s a brittleness and a tenderness in all the characters. The outsized egos that performing requires are nevertheless easily bruised, often by those they care about. Everyone, though, has a tacit understanding of how this works. Bitch if you must, but console when required. We’re all fragile and needy at times.

I loved this show. It’s written as much for those on the inside as the general audience, and all the better, because it feels authentic. I honestly had to Google some of what was going on. Straw phonation, anyone? And it’s resolutely, performatively camp. But that’s musical theatre, darling.

Stan has packaged the eight short episodes together as a 50-ish minute ‘movie’, and it’s definitely worth seeking out. Fingers crossed for another eight episodes. Chookas!

Five Minute Call is now streaming on Stan and available to buy or rent on Apple.

Website: https://www.stan.com.au/watch/five-minute-call-2026

Socials: https://www.instagram.com/fiveminutecallseries/