BROADWAY REVIEW: ‘Fallen Angels’ Kelli O’Hara and Rose Byrne are elegantly wasted

Notwithstanding their other myriad talents, Broadway stars Kelli O’Hara and Rose Byrne are offering quite the masterclass in faux inebriation in Noel Coward’s “Fallen Angels,” being as their pair of romantically adventurous, bourgeois married women spend much of this 1925 comedy either tipsy, sozzled or, to use a classless term that Coward would have abhorred, wasted.

Not since the glory days of Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley in “Absolutely Fabulous” has there been a funnier pair of women playing drunk as one currently finds at the Todd Haimes Theatre on Broadway.

This is deceptively hard to pull off. The key for the actor, of course, is the understanding that the inebriated always strive for sobriety; they don’t actually choose to go, say, sliding down the bannister of a glam David Rockwell set. But their limbs don’t respond to commands and off they go, legs flailing and champagne flute a-flying. Mouths are also known to speak without reference to any input from the brain.

Director Scott Ellis understands all this and thus the admirably specific physical business and slurred verbosity in his gently outré revival really makes for quite the amusing diversion. Things bop along pleasantly enough in the company of such consummate professionals, all having fun.

“Fallen Angels,” Coward’s take on the notorious marital seven-year itch, was written the same year as the superior “Hay Fever,” which became a big hit. So, the overshadowed former play has only been rarely seen. If you are looking for deeper meaning in Coward’s flighty story of two married couples (Aasif Mandvi and Christopher Fitzgerald play the mostly clueless husbands), stressed by the wives’ mutual interest in the same handsome Frenchman, handsomely played by Mark Consuelos, it probably lies in its manifestation of the early 20th Century British insecurity over the nation’s total lack of sexiness.

Coward was a steak-and-kidney-pie kind of fellow and the characters in his plays obsessed over their manners, their tableware and their tea. Underneath, this play suggests, British society in the 1920s was horny as all get out.

Both women have a past with said Frenchmen, although Coward also implies that, if the affair in the play (let alone the implied ménage à trois) actually were to be revived to full fruition, the women would run back to their drawing rooms and husbands in a full-on panic. Assuming they were not too drunk to walk.

Be that as it may, “Fallen Angels” (staged here in one swift act, thank heavens) mostly is about the thrill of their chase and the dumbness of their spouses. And, no doubt, women in the original 1920s audience presumably had comparable lustful desires as the pair on stage. This was hardly the only Coward comedy of its era to be used for foreplay.

For variety, Coward also made extensive use of a trick he learned from Oscar Wilde: the servant who knows far more than her bosses. In this instance, the ebullient Tracee Chimo plays a Zelig-like maid, Saunders, who has seen and done everything, or so she claims. This is another very funny performance, filled with the joie de vivre of oneupmanship, or rather upwomanship. Coward understood the importance of little victories to get you through the day.