Fallen Angels
Opening Night: April 19, 2026
Theater: Todd Haimes Theatre
Website: www.roundabouttheatre.org
Two upper-class wives, their husbands away for the day, share a few toasts to their pre-marital dalliances—with the same man, who just may be en route from France to visit. Old rivalries and past scandals bubble to the surface in this intoxicating romp from one of theatre’s comedy masters. Sparkling, dizzying, and deliciously potent, Noël Coward’s Champagne-fresh comedy of bad manners shocked and delighted audiences in its 1925 premiere. Now Emmy® nominee Rose Byrne and Tony Award® winner & Emmy® nominee Kelli O’Hara join forces to bring Coward’s unmatched wit to life once again, under the direction of Roundabout Interim Artistic Director Scott Ellis.
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April 19, 2026
It wasn’t that long ago that comedy seemed like an endangered species on Broadway… But if you’re looking for pure escapist fun to provide some immediate relief, “Fallen Angels” can’t be beat.
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April 19, 2026
Byrne and O’Hara are the main reasons to see this excellent revival. In O’Hara’s case, one could even call this production revelatory, given not only how unexpected it is to see her tap into her inner farceur but how stellar she turns out to be at it.
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April 19, 2026
Fallen Angels is a most welcome springtime treat, a smart, breezy entry in Broadway’s chaotically busy pre-Tony season.
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April 19, 2026
If only the 90 minutes that preceded that killer capper had more fizz to them. O’Hara and Byrne may be bleeding for every laugh, but you can’t ignore the fact that “Fallen Angels” is one of Coward’s lesser works. The play proves that even in his 20s, he was already perfecting his transgressive wit.
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April 19, 2026
Well-written, well-acted, escalating fizz can wind up facing a challenge: What happens when it’s time to finish off the bottle and head home? In its dénouement, Fallen Angels doesn’t reach the sublime heights of, say, The Importance of Being Earnest — even Coward couldn’t quite figure out how to keep a promise as talked-up as Maurice Duclos without an anticlimax. Ellis doesn’t solve the riddle, either. Under his direction, the show’s delicious froth flattens in its final scenes.
READ THE REVIEWApril 19, 2026
Rose Byrne and stage veteran Kelli O’Hara… The two are stars of elastic, compulsively watchable talent, and the unexpectedness of their pairing only serves their dynamic in this expert staging of Coward’s play, as their characters goad each other’s worst impulses on until they come into conflict with their own. Their performances work – brilliantly – in the converse, with Byrne’s knack for bawdiness and O’Hara’s born gentility swirling around to intoxicating effect.
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April 19, 2026
Byrne and O’Hara are a good comic team, but not a great one. Unlike Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance, they haven’t decided whose the alpha comic and who’s the beta, and their twin very high-pitched sopranos are too equally matched, making the first 30 minutes something of a screeching match.
READ THE REVIEWApril 19, 2026
The Broadway stars Kelli O’Hara and Rose Byrne are offering quite the masterclass in faux inebriation in Noël Coward’s “Fallen Angels”
READ THE REVIEWApril 19, 2026
All in all, the production, headed by director Scott Ellis, is a laugh-out-loud evening at the theatre. It’s good old-fashioned comedy at its best.
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April 19, 2026
“Fallen Angels” looks handsome and sounds promising on paper, but in execution, it proves curiously insubstantial, a revival with style to spare but little reason to exist.
READ THE REVIEWApril 19, 2026
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.
READ THE REVIEWApril 19, 2026
Director Scott Ellis tends to rush the pace of the comedy, when taking a bit more leisure about it might make Coward’s already clipped dialogue easier to appreciate. His staging takes surprisingly little advantage of the expansive set and its deluxe furnishings. The program notes that Coward revised the play in 1958 following its revival on Broadway, although this intermission-free version appears to bear other fingerprints as well.
READ THE REVIEWApril 19, 2026
The main draw of this production are the two poised and celebrated actresses, and the main pleasure is watching them dive ass-first into the slapstick.
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April 19, 2026
An overarching problem of director Scott Ellis’ production is its attempts to spin every moment into comic gold quite clunkily, when actors should be zipping through the setup. The hubbys are the main offenders, taking their uppercrust puffery to an obnoxious extreme. And because of their cartoonishness, we never believe they so much as live with these women, let alone are married to them.
READ THE REVIEWApril 19, 2026
Broadway has not seen a more delectable diversion this season than the bubbly revival of Noël Coward’s early comedy “Fallen Angels,” starring the glittering duo of Rose Byrne and Kelli O’Hara… even when their characters are at their cattiest, Ms. Byrne and Ms. O’Hara are clearly having a grand time depicting these genteel women dropping their grandeur under the influence of heightened emotion and high alcohol consumption. And they see to it that, even without the benefit of a flute or 12 of champagne, the audience has a grand time too.
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April 24, 2026
It’s a credit to director Scott Ellis that every other performer in this racy 1920s-set riot (Tracee Chimo, Aasif Mandvi, Christopher Fitzgerald and Mark Consuelos) also understands exactly what kind of play they’re in. And most of the time, their task is simple: Stay out of Byrne and O’Hara’s ways. Each actress is a powerhouse in her own right. But together? Talk about a double act for the ages.
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