movie review
Fallen Angels
One hour and 30 minutes with no intermission. At the Todd Haimes Theatre, 227 W. 42nd Street.
There’s not much more to “Fallen Angels,” Noël Coward’s rice-paper-thin 1925 comedy, than two sex-crazed women getting wasted.
That brief synopsis alone probably just sent a bunch of you racing to the box office website.
But then there are the two marvelously matched actresses playing the Olympian lushes in the revival that opened Sunday at the Todd Haimes Theatre: Oscar nominee Rose Byrne and Tony Award winner Kelli O’Hara.
The game pair begin as the picture of Coward ladies, for whom humor is typically delivered from the neck up. But they soon drunkenly devolve into a flailing and maniacal Edina and Patsy from the Brit-com “Absolutely Fabulous,” falling over armchairs and crawling on the carpet of a gorgeous London apartment in silky gowns while pounding Champagne.
They drink, they smoke, they scream, they tumble. They’re wives gone wild.
That riot of a second scene of the playlet, one of the “Private Lives” writer’s early, lesser efforts, is delicious and lowers the audience’s shoulders after a very shaky start of oversold jokes and ear-drum-piercing British accents that run the gamut.
The alcohol-fueled hilarity and fun aren’t really the result of anything Coward wrote though — there’s only a drizzle of wit to be found here — but because Byrne and O’Hara are largely left to their own insane devices.
Of course, every party kicks off with the awkward “How about this weather?”s and ends the next morning with a raging hangover. “Fallen Angels” is much the same — the middle is splendid and then there’s the rest.
What has driven these desperate women to the bottle? Byrne plays Jane and O’Hara is Julia, a pair of unhappily married friends whose seven-year itch has them scratching 24/7. Their husbands Willy (Christopher Fitzgerald) and Fred (Aasif Mandvi) are stiff bores and the domestic drudgery has grown suffocating.
Then — bonjour! — the duo learns that an old French flame they both had flings with back in the day named Maurice Duclos (Mark Consuelos) is coming to town. On the night he’s supposed to stop by, the girls have dinner and down a whole vineyard’s supply of booze in nervousness and then animalistic frustration.
Forget binge-watching, this is watch binging.
Byrne, whose hair toward the end might’ve been styled by the Bride of Frankenstein, excels in roles that have an outwardly perfect person epically fall apart. See: “Bridesmaids,” “Neighbors” and “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” Actually, “If I had legs, I’d kick you!” sounds like a line her sloshed Jane would yell. Physically, Byrne plays the part like it’s a modern Hollywood comedy and walks away with most of the laughs.
O’Hara also has a knack for put-together types, like Anna in “The King and I” or Nellie Forbush in “South Pacific.” But, outside of some unexpected romance, those classic musical sopranos generally stay upright. Watching such a fine-china actress as O’Hara shatter on the floor, sliding down designer David Rockwell’s grand staircase and crudely spitting out sweets, is a hoot.
Oh, right! There are four other people in this play.
The closest that one comes to going toe to toe with O’Hara and Byrne is Tracee Chimo as Julia’s maid Saunders. The character is a one-gag amusement. The gist is that Saunders has an unexpected wealth of life experience for a housekeeper and constantly interjects. A “yes, ma’am!” chipper Chimo is fine, but the bit wears thin.
And neither of the actors playing the cuckolded men is any good. It’s easy to dismiss them as unnecessary passengers in a two-star vehicle, but they really do drag down the play.
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.
Consuelos arrives fashionably late, and his French brogue is, ahem, sacre bleu!
These guys sure make you need a drink. So, it’s a good thing that when Byrne and O’Hara pop the cork, they glug away Jane and Julia’s problems and, for at least half an hour, ours too.
