As Julia and Jane, O’Hara and Byrne flex all their comedic muscles, pulling off physical pratfalls, cheeky slow burns, pithy zingers, and side-splitting sight gags (cue Byrne’s wig!). Whatever the character calls for, the stars step up.

For O’Hara, "confidence" is the key to landing laughs — even if you miss the mark. It’s about “just being willing to fail,” she said. “And believe me, we have. There’s crickets at times where we've tried things that haven't worked.

“It's about being flexible,” she continued. “It's about saying, 'This is not perfect, and it's not going to be the same every night, and it's not going to work every night, and it may not work at all and there's egg on my face.' I feel like I'm pretty good about that.”

The same goes for Byrne, O’Hara observed. “Rose is an exceptional go-getter,” she said. “She's a brave, brave actress, and she just goes there, and it inspires me to go there. I couldn't be more grateful to be paired this way.”

Byrne admits that she avoids eye contact with O’Hara at times so she doesn’t break character. “I can’t look at her in certain parts,” Byrne said. “I can't look at her because it's so heightened.”

Byrne said she’s over the moon to be grappling with high hurdles on Broadway. “I am obsessed with comedy,” said Byrne, who’s previously cracked film audiences up in Bridesmaids, Neighbors, and Spy.

“I love it, and I always return to it because I'm trying to get better at it,” she said. “I’m thrilled to be trying every night, again and again, to make people laugh,” said Byrne. “It’s a roller coaster.”

That metaphor suggests the up-and-down nature of landing laughs on stage, but they're clearly hitting a high. Mark Consuelos, who makes his Broadway debut as the Frenchman Maurice Duclos, credits Byrne and O’Hara for their boldness.

“They’re so unhinged,” he said. “We have two comedic geniuses leading our play. I get to hear them upstairs in my dressing room, over the speaker. I’m laughing. I sneak down sometimes and watch them on the monitor.”

His favorite scene comes in Act 2, when Jane and Julia toss back too many cocktails. “I’m just listening to the audience get drunk with them,” said Consuelos. “It’s amazing.”

Comedy relies on timing and delivery in more ways than one. Fallen Angels arrives at a moment when audiences are looking for reasons to laugh out loud.

“Right now, it's probably important or necessary for people to see something that's really funny and just takes them out of everything,” said Aasif Mandvi, who plays Julia’s husband, Fred, adding that the play delivers on that. “It's an hour and a half of a lot of laughs, so it’s just super fun.”

And, it turns out for the cast, it's also eye-opening. “You always think you know where the laughs are,” said Mandvi. “And then when you get in front of an audience, they tell you what's funny. That’s always surprising and always really fun for an actor.”

Tracee Chimo, who plays Julia’s very accomplished maid, echoed that sentiment. “We are all having a lot of fun,” she said. “It's a lovely escape for the audience to come and hopefully laugh for 90 minutes,” she said.

“For me,” she added, “the secret of a comedy is just something where you get to lose yourself completely. That’s hopefully what we're doing here.”

Coward was only 24 when he wrote Fallen Angels. Inspired by French farce, he fashioned a frisky and very funny story for British audiences. His gift for funny business was in his grasp early on.

That applies not just to when the stars are turning couches, staircases, and phone cords into comedy tools, but to when they are just talking, too. That's a testament to Coward's witty wordplay and banter, according to Byrne: “The language is so specific and extraordinary. It’s a linguistic gymnastic feat.”

“It’s great material,” echoed Christopher Fitzgerald, who plays Jane’s husband, Willy. The cast makes the most of the script in every sense. “As a company, we have a really good time together,” said Fitzgerald. “So, the audience has a really good time together.”

And, seriously, that’s no joke.

Get Fallen Angels tickets now.

Gillian Russo contributed reporting for this article.

Photo credit: Fallen Angels on Broadway. (Photos by Joan Marcus)