Broadway Revival of Noel Coward’s 'Fallen Angels' Starring Rose Byrne and Kelli O’Hara: A Spirited but Uneven Comedy

Noel Coward’s Fallen Angels is not the playwright’s most celebrated work—unlike his 1924 breakthrough The Vortex, which shocked audiences with themes of drug addiction, female promiscuity, and incest. Opening a year later in 1925, Fallen Angels adopted a lighter tone but failed to achieve the same notoriety.

The play follows Julia and Jane, two married women who reminisce about their shared affair with a French lover in Italy before their marriages to dull Englishmen. Their candid discussions about past infidelities—kept secret from their husbands—shocked British censors in the 1920s. The characters’ frankness and shared history made the play risqué for its time.

The Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Fallen Angels premiered at the Todd Haimes Theatre on Sunday. Like the 1999 Broadway premiere of Coward’s Waiting in the Wings—a play he wrote decades earlier—this production includes "additional material" by Claudia Shear. The revisions streamline the original three-act comedy into a 90-minute runtime without intermission.

Director Scott Ellis struggles to ignite the play’s comic potential in the first act, which runs uncharacteristically long for a Coward comedy. Once the humor takes hold, the focus shifts to the physical comedy of Rose Byrne as Jane and Kelli O’Hara as Julia. Their drunken antics—reminiscent of Lucille Ball’s iconic I Love Lucy Vitameatavegamin episode—deliver slapstick gold, with Byrne and O’Hara executing pratfalls, chair slides, and stumbles with comedic precision.

While Byrne and O’Hara share a strong comedic chemistry, their dynamic lacks the clear hierarchy of classic comedy duos like Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance. Their equally matched high-pitched sopranos create a screeching effect in the early scenes, and the first act drags before the humor fully lands. The extended drunk scene dominates what remains of the original second act, while the third act—sober and subdued—fails to recapture the same energy.

The production’s standout moment arrives unexpectedly: Byrne’s much-ratted wig makes a surprise appearance, adding a final touch of absurdity to the revival.