Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels is back on Broadway at the Todd Haimes Theatre in New York, and this revival has the kind of snap that makes a near-century-old comedy feel newly mischievous. Rose Byrne and Kelli O’Hara lead Scott Ellis’s production, with Byrne as Jane and O’Hara as Julia, the two women at the center of Coward’s champagne-soaked marital farce.
The review calls the show pitch-perfect and says Byrne and O’Hara are comic gems, praising a production that sparkles like champagne while keeping its bite. Aasif Mandvi plays Julia’s husband, Christopher Fitzgerald plays Jane’s husband, and Tracee Chimo appears as their maid, completing a cast built for the play’s fast, brittle rhythms.
That matters because Fallen Angels has appeared only twice on Broadway since its 1927 stateside premiere, after first opening in London two years earlier, and it was nearly censored by the office of the Lord Chamberlain for its sexual frankness. Nearly 99 years later, the review says the play still feels hilariously horny and startlingly modern, a reminder that Coward’s wit has not dulled with age.
The revival’s surprise is not just that it returns a rare Noël Coward comedy to Broadway, but that it does so without making the play feel dusty or archival. The review says the exchange between these two women — including the line, “I think that uncommonly selfish of the fellow, unleashing her upon an unsuspecting world” — lands with the speed and vanity Coward wrote into the piece, while the men around them scramble to keep up.
For Broadway, the next question is less whether the revival is faithful than whether this is the kind of elegant, sexually charged comedy audiences still show up for. On the evidence of this review, the answer is yes: Fallen Angels is not being revived as a museum piece, but as a sharp reminder that Coward understood desire, vanity and panic long before they became respectable subjects for the stage.
