An independently produced Australian comedy about life backstage at a hit musical is finding an audience on Stan. Five Minute Call, created, written by and starring Simon Burke AO and Helen Dallimore, ranked among Stan’s Top 5 movie releases of 2026 during its first 10 days on the platform. Although Five Minute Call was conceived as a television series, it has been released on Stan as a single program, so it is measured against the platform’s movie releases.
Burke and Dallimore play Simon Drew and Helen Barrymore, heightened versions of themselves and the stars of a successful Australian musical. Each night, the two meet in Helen’s dressing room at the five minute call, five minutes before the curtain goes up, to talk through their careers, colleagues and insecurities. With Helen’s voice failing and her ambitious young understudy waiting in the wings, Simon is desperately auditioning for a Hollywood television pilot that could be his last shot at international stardom. Along the way, a steady stream of eccentric colleagues, demanding creatives and unexpected visitors drop by, along with some celebrity cameos.
The cast also includes Genevieve Lemon, Catherine Vān-Davies, Chaska Halliday and Joel Granger, with guest appearances from Georgie Parker, Trevor Ashley, Jonathan Biggins, Peter Carroll and choreographer John ‘Cha-Cha’ O’Connell. The series is pitched as part workplace comedy and part industry satire, in the vein of Extras, Call My Agent and Hacks.
Simon Burke AO explained how the series grew out of the pair’s years in theatre and what its reception has meant to them.
FIVE MINUTE CALL was born of our thousands of nights working in the theatre, collecting countless outrageous anecdotes that we’ve been dying to unleash on an audience for years. Helen and I both love workplace comedies so we set out to create our own – where the ‘office’ is the dressing room, backstage of a big musical. To see a show we created ourselves from scratch rank among Stan’s Top 5 movie releases of 2026, in its first ten days no less, is beyond anything we could have hoped for. It’s incredibly exciting to find an audience that is responding so generously to its honesty, its outrageousness and its big heart.
Helen Dallimore described the show as a tribute to their friendship and to the industry.
We are so thrilled that audiences are embracing FIVE MINUTE CALL! To have remained in Stan’s Top 10 Australian movie releases for the last few weeks is an incredible result for our little independently produced comedy. There’s something wonderfully satisfying about using our decades of friendship, of hanging out in each other’s dressing rooms and making each other laugh like drains, to create this love letter to each other, to the industry we love, and to the beautiful broken lunatics who keep showing up, hitting their light and pretending it’s all under control.
Both leads have long theatre careers. Burke won an AFI Best Actor Award at 13 for The Devil’s Playground and has since appeared in Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, La Cage aux Folles and the original sold-out Australian tour of Moulin Rouge! The Musical as Harold Zidler, as well as spending 25 years as a presenter on ABC TV’s Play School. Dallimore originated the role of Glinda in the West End production of Wicked opposite Idina Menzel, and has appeared in Into the Woods, Legally Blonde and the Australian production of Grey Gardens.
Five Minute Call is directed by Ainslie Clouston and produced by Bec Bignell, Simon Burke, Gus Murray and Robert Patterson, with a predominantly female production crew that also includes director of photography Emma Ellis, editors Lily Davis and Grace O’Connell, and production designer Katie Beere.
