It’s the first show after opening night for “Fallen Angels,” and the celebration is still in bloom for Broadway star Kelli O’Hara.
“I did walk in here today and all the flowers are still in here — there’s streamers,” she says from her dressing room at the Todd Haimes Theatre before the evening performance. Earlier that morning, she received a Critics Circle nomination for outstanding lead performer in a play. “There’s an exhaustion that comes with the relief of this hard work,” she adds. “You feel relief when things seem to be positive. Where you go, ‘Oh, OK, now I can relax.’”
O’Hara leads the Broadway revival of the 1925 comedic play alongside Rose Byrne. The women star as Julia and Jane, two married friends who reconnect with a mutual former flame while both of their husbands are away. For opening night, O’Hara paid homage to the onstage friendship by wearing a dress that combined the characters’ two signature colors.
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“ Rose wears an emerald green dress and I wear a lavender pink dress [onstage],” O’Hara says. “When I put it on, it just felt like I was gonna arrive at the party not just for me, but for the two of us.”
After taking their opening night bows, O’Hara celebrated the moment alongside her castmates, friends and family, including her brother and father who flew in a few days earlier to surprise her for her birthday.
“I had some old colleagues and friends in the industry that also came out and showed up. I was walking through the party going, ‘It’s you! It’s you! It’s you!’” she says. “That feels so great, just to see my people I admire and celebrate with them.”
While eight-time Tony nominee O’Hara is best known for her dramatic roles — including her 2015 Tony-winning run in “The King and I” and “The Gilded Age” onscreen — she embraced the opportunity to lean into her comedic side with “Fallen Angels.”
“It’s absolutely slapstick comedy,” O’Hara says of the play, adding that she was a fan of comedic icons Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball while growing up. “I love drama, and I think that is a genre that I live in the most, but I have so much of this goofball thing in me, and I don’t often get to play those types of roles,” she continues. “And so I thought this was going to be a really great departure, or at least exploration, for me. And to think I could do it with Rose — who is such a comedian — has been the greatest joy.”
O’Hara also dives head-first — sometimes literally — into the physical comedy of her character, a departure from some of the more “upright women” she’s portrayed.
“As we started staging this, it was so fun to be like, oh, because I’m drunk, I can fall over the chair, or I could fall down the stairs — and it’s what the show calls for,” she says. “This is actually inviting that side of me to come out. I have a feeling by the time we close there will be a lot more, because it’s too much fun.”
Moving into the play’s limited main run — it’s currently scheduled through June 7 — O’Hara is looking forward to the ongoing challenge of continuing to find the fun, while staying true to the production and story. And, above all, providing a joyful escape for audiences.
“I wanted so badly to just provide an escape for 90 minutes. We’re not solving problems necessarily, although we are talking about some pretty universal feelings,” she says of the show, which was controversial when it first premiered in 1925 for its depiction of female desire.
Now, it’s an opportunity to “take a break and do some self care by laughing,” O’Hara adds. “Even if you’re laughing because it’s kind of stupid, or you’re laughing because it’s an actual belly laugh. Or you’re just thinking and listening to the really amazing words of [playwright] Noël Coward.”
