Herald Sun Review: Call Girl the Musical

Where: Chapel off Chapel, Prahran, until May 3
Reviewer: Chris Boyd
4 Stars

LET’S get one thing straight, the call girl of the title is a call-centre girl, not a call girl of the escort variety . . . though she does screw a few people, financially speaking.

At the outset, Jean is a selfless, do-gooder wife and mum. She descends from the heavens in her white altar-boy robes; communion wafer wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

Her life is dedicated to her volunteer work: tending to the poor, the sick and the needy.

When her bored, untended, two-timing hubby gives her the flick — for Felicity at the pharmacy — Jean has to fend for herself. She lands a job at the local call centre, gradually overcomes her horror at the deceit required to make a sale, and morphs into a power-crazed wheeler-dealer.

At this point, I have to say this is far and away the stupidest and flimsiest story I’ve seen set to music since Starlight Express. But unlike S-Ex, Call Girl lights up the switchboard with one dazzling (albeit stupid and flimsy) hit song after another.

And they’re delivered with optic-fibre speed, efficiency and clarity. Fast and furious.

Call Girl is very much Tracy Harvey’s baby. Her concept, her music and words — helped out by writer Doug MacLeod — and it is she, centre stage, in the starring role.

She doesn’t seem to have aged a day in the 25 years since The Gillies Report. Nor has the patter aged. It’s still irresistible, silly or not.

The musicality of her speaking voice means the transitions between speech and song are seamless, too, even when some of the actual scene changes crunch like a stick-shift without a clutch.

Harvey is flanked by some outstanding performers, especially Raelene Isbester as the sadistic Samantha and Laura Burzacott as the ambitious young sales girl. They’re great dancers with great voices and they show great command of the stage.
As a piece of theatre, Call Girl is (at least) another draft away from perfection. It needs to be tightened up — when it slows we realise just how ridiculous it really is — and could lose the interval.

This Call Girl definitely has legs. If only she knew how to use them.