Even after a century on the shelf, champagne doesn’t always lose its fizz. Noël Coward’s bubble-light 1925 comedy Fallen Angels, back on Broadway for the first time in 70 years, is a bit of period piffle that showcases the comedic skills of a remarkable trio of actresses. In Scott Ellis’s effervescent revival, Rose Byrne and Kelli O’Hara play a pair of frenetic frenemies in 1920s London who are both married to uptight dullards (Christopher Fitzgerald and Aasif Mandvi, respectively). The two simultaneously get a case of the seven-year itch when a former lover from both of their pasts writes to say he wants to meet up — conveniently while the husbands are out of town on a weekend golf trip.
Hilarity, along with a renewed sense of bitchy rivalry, ensues. Byrne’s Jane Banbury and O’Hara’s Julia Sterroll engage in a verbal duel that’s part nostalgia for the very suave, very French lothario they both remember fondly and part sharp-elbowed gamesmanship as they seek to position themselves at the front of the ex’s romantic queue — especially since their biggest connection now may be their mutual antipathy toward husbands whose ardor seems mostly reserved for golf. Fitzgerald and Mandvi are fine in underwritten roles as pompous nitwits all too easily overshadowed both by their wives. They’re also both upstaged by the lush set re-creating the Sterrolls’ living room, with a metal balustered staircase leading up to the bedrooms and double-story curtains framing the casement windows onto a terrace, beautifully rendered by David Rockwell and lit by Kenneth Posner.
The napkin-thin story, which director Scott Ellis and writer Claudia Schear have trimmed to a lithe 90-minute running time, takes a little while to wind up. But the laughs accelerate when the champagne cocktails begin to flow and the two stars slur their words (sometimes between mouthfuls of profiteroles), stumble over and around the furniture, and search the floor on all fours for the shoes they kicked off minutes before.
Drunk scenes can be tricky to pull off, but Byrne in particular wrings laughs with impressive skill, turning an uptight housewife into a soused wife who becomes increasingly unhinged. (As she falls deeper into her coupes, she also makes good use of Jeff Mahshie’s ornate Jazz Age costumes and David Brian Brown’s hair and wig design.) O’Hara manages to keep up with Byrne, even displaying a surprising knack for physical comedy when she collapses over a chair and proceeds to slide down it onto the floor head first.
The two are nearly upstaged by Tracee Chimo as Julia’s Zelig-like servant, Saunders, who inserts herself into her employers’ lives with knowledge honed from an improbable string of past gigs. She demonstrates an expertise in golf, classical music, the French language, desert survival skills, treatments for stammering, and sure-fire hangover cures. A bossy chatterbox who literally nudges O’Hara’s Julia off the bench of the baby grand piano to demonstrate how the tune should be played, she also intuits just when to defer to her employers and retreat to her domain in the kitchen. Chimo is a scene-swiping treat who brings an uproarious mix of smug self-satisfaction and reluctant deference to the role.
Coward is no Beckett. Unlike Godot, there really is a suave Frenchman who wooed Julia and Jane (in Pisa and Venice, respectively) and arrives in the play’s rushed final scene. But when Mark Consuelos turns up as Maurice Duclos, it’s a bit of a letdown — and not just because the daytime TV veteran speaks in a voice that’s barely European much less French. The character is basically a human MacGufffin meant to generate friction among the four primary players in Coward’s romantic farce. The revelation of the heroines’ premarital sex lives — once so shocking that London censors initially banned the play — now seems rather quaint. Still, Ellis and his cast have ginned up enough boozy shenanigans in Fallen Angels that the lingering buzz carries you through the show’s duller and more dated sections. ★★★★☆
FALLEN ANGELS
Todd Haimes Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes (with no intermission)
Tickets on sale through June 7 for $72 to $276