If you like your martinis strong and your leading ladies stronger, good news: Rose Byrne and Kelli O’Hara are currently clinking glasses and running around like a high-toned Lucy and Ethel in the Roundabout’s fizzy revival of Fallen Angels.
One of Noël Coward’s earliest works, Fallen Angels was also one of his most controversial: Back in 1925, the play almost didn’t make it past the Lord Chamberlain, due to its potentially censorious glorification of premarital sex. And therein lies the entirety of the plot: While their respective husbands, Fred (Aasif Mandvi) and Willy (Christopher Fitzgerald), are off golfing, Julia (O’Hara) and Jane (Byrne) spend an evening reminiscing about, and awaiting the out-of-the-blue arrival of, a Frenchman with whom they each had a gloriously passionate affair nine years earlier.
So what are a couple desperate housewives to do while impatiently anticipating the appearance of their former French flame? Get rip-roaring drunk, of course. The ladies start with martinis, then move on to Champagne—“Champagne is a great strengthener,” Julia says assuredly—all while waxing poetic about his eyes, his hands, his teeth, and his legs (le sigh!). And, as the housekeeper Saunders (a delightful Tracee Chimo) says, “several drinks never do any harm. It is only the first which is dangerous, after that the damage is done.” She’s very wise, that Saunders. She also speaks fluent French, plays the baby grand like a pro, spent time in the Foreign Legion, traveled through the desert with the Red Cross, quotes Demosthenes in casual conversation, worked as a barmaid, and knows precisely which golf clubs to use on which course. She’s even good enough to inquire about Fred’s balls.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Eventually, the ladies acknowledge their ravenous hunger for actual food. (But not before Julia offers Jane a salted almond, which she gratefully accepts; if you’re a fan of the 2011 movie Bridesmaids, you can’t help but laugh, remembering the dressing-room scene with Byrne, Kristen Wiig, and the Jordan almonds.) The meal? French, naturellement: des huîtres, des oeufs au plat Bercy, tournedos and pommes Dauphin, and profiteroles au chocolat.
They swap non sequiturs over supper in a supremely silly attempt to conceal their conversation from Saunders: “She ought never to have been burnt at the stake because she was such a very nice girl”; “I have heard that the worst part of parenting is the children”; “I wonder—whoever decided that undergarments should be white?” By now, Julia and Jane are completely lost in their Champagne-colored fantasyland; alternating between wistful and romantic, giddy and giggly, snippy and bossy, the ladies are clearly paying the price for that damnable dangerous first drink.
Even a single drunk scene can grow tiresome quickly, so an entire play built around an extended display of upper-middle-class BFFs behaving badly could easily become extremely irritating. Thankfully, O’Hara and Byrne are so wonderful—and so wonderfully matched—that there’s no getting annoyed with either of them. They can take out the audience with one look, the flick of a cigarette lighter, or the toss of a scarf (Byrne using her napkin as a neckerchief to accessorize Jeff Mahshie’s stunning green dinner dress, a wonderful nod to Keira Knightley’s Atonement gown, is a stroke of genius). And there’s a hysterical bit involving O’Hara, the telephone, an armchair, and a very slow head-first dive that must be seen to be believed.
The husbands do eventually return, and quickly get up on their high horses about their wives’ pasts. (“Men never forgive that sort of thing, no matter when it happened,” Julia notes.) And oh yes—the much-discussed ex-lover, Maurice Duclos, makes a last-minute appearance. In a canny bit of casting, he’s played by former All My Children star/actor/Emmy-winning morning show host Mark Consuelos, with a chiseled jaw, toothpaste-commercial smile, and possibly French accent.
Fallen Angels opened April 19, 2026, at the Todd Haimes Theatre and runs through June 7. Tickets and information: roundabouttheatre.org
