Chicago Tribune - Recommended
"..."Fallen Angels" is a good deal of seasonal fun, a light and fast-moving affair that allows Gavino and Stoughton to flirt and flutter all over the stage in Janice Pytel's savvy costumes, behaving badly and loving every last second of life, if not their actual boring husbands."
Chicago Reader - Highly Recommended
"...Written when Coward was in his early 20s, this Jazz Age gem-daring in its day for skewering conventional attitudes about female friendship and sexuality-hilariously mixes stylish sophistication with screwball zaniness."
Windy City Times - Highly Recommended
"...Fred Geyer, Jesse Dornan and Joshua Moaney acquit themselves with alacrity as the befuddled males, but the show belongs to the three actresses shouldering the bulk of the madcap action. Eliza Stoughten, Emjoy Gavino and Annabel Armour discharge their athletic duties with a composure and grace belying the stamina required to execute full-body rolls off pianos, sprints in sling-backed high-heeled slippers and something known in theatrical jargon as a "fruit and feather fight." Heightening the giddiness factor is Christopher Kriz's score of vo-de-o-do ditties, Jeff Bauer's pop-up deco apartment and Janice Pytel's serrated-edge maid's cap and apron suggesting a shock-balloon in comic-book art."
Gapers Block - Highly Recommended
"...Cochran's direction is outstanding. She choreographs Gavino's and Stoughton's party with style and comic touches. During dinner, after many glasses of champagne, Jane forks up her whole beef tournedos and chews off a piece. Later, standing on a small riser, both women realize they need to sit down and plop down like rag dolls on the stair. When they fight over a telephone call that might be from Maurice, the two women perform a telephone cord tango. Period music and sound design by Christopher Kriz are a key part of the production and also highlight intermission and pre-show."
Time Out Chicago - Somewhat Recommended
"...Though it was apparently scandalous in the still pre-suffrage Britain of 1925, Coward’s confection comes across now as harmless and a little toothless. There’s entertainment to be had in the play’s central scene, in which the women get falling-down drunk in their nervous anticipation of Maurice’s potential arrival. Gavino and Stoughton play plastered quite amusingly, especially in marking their characters’ careening emotional arcs under the influence. And Remy Bumppo stalwart Annabel Armour makes the most of her role as a no-nonsense maid whose own extensive backstory provides comic relief."
ChicagoCritic - Recommended
"...Cochran finds a lot of humor in this script. She even choreographed chuckle-worthy transitions, again involving Armour's Saunders. Scenic designer Jeff Bauer and props designer Amanda Herrmann were limited by having to create a room that can be wrecked and rebuilt every night, but the glamour of the 1920s is still hinted at, and apparent in Janice Pytel's costumes. Coward satirized lingering Victorian gender roles among the older members of his generation in Fallen Angels, but the main reason to see this play is for the slapstick. While showing rich jerks falling on their faces and getting cuckolded might not be the most mature social commentary, it is a relief in the context of so many other drawing room comedies in which rudeness and selfishness are treated as wit."
Chicago Theatre Review - Recommended
"...Coward’s comedy celebrates the newly liberated woman of the Roaring Twenties, females who, after WWI, were finding their voice, canvasing for equal rights and following their dreams by living their own lives and have a great time doing so. The playwright’s deconstruction of the sophisticated Victorian drawing room Comedy of Manners, popularized by Oscar Wilde, resulted in audiences being scandalized by what they saw on the stage. Women talking about sex, confiding in each other about past liaisons and future fantasies, not to mention getting drunk before our very eyes, was shocking to most audiences. Today we laugh openly at such goings-on but in the 1920’s this was revolutionary and groundbreaking entertainment."
Chicagoland Theater Reviews - Recommended
"...The narrative interest accelerates considerably in the second act with the return of the husbands and the appearance, finally, of Maurice, who has been the elephant in the living room since the first scene. The play turns into a farce with much dithering about and confusion and bickering. The play ends on a satisfactory note of ambiguity, leaving the suddenly befuddled husbands wondering if their wives did or didn’t do “it” with Maurice once upon a time and what implication the Frenchman’s surprise reappearance holds for the future of their tepid marriages."
The Fourth Walsh - Highly Recommended
"...FALLEN ANGELS is how classy people misbehave. These high-class ladies get wasted and try to get laid. The chic hijinks are highly amusing. FALLEN ANGELS is a light-frothy escape back to the 1920s. It's a wonderful respite from contemporary holiday pressure."
Chicago Theater Beat - Highly Recommended
"...Even though our perspective has changed on some of the thematic elements of Fallen Angels, the emotion of jealousy remains as strong today as it did 90, 900, or 9,000 years ago. We can easily identify with two women competing over a man and two men feeling insecure about themselves. Cochran's production of Fallen Angels rises to the occasion of helping us empathize with this timeless emotion by nailing Coward's timeless comedy"
Splash Magazine - Highly Recommended
"...All this said, what's most fun about this production is how director Shannon Cochran orchestrates ever so physical gags with gestures and gymnastics. It begins before the first words are spoken when married couple Julia (Emjoy Gavino) and Fred (Fred Geyer) dance into the room as if they are parade floats with rhythm."
NewCity Chicago - Highly Recommended
"...What keeps the show funny is the Cowardly artifice of it all. The women self-consciously perform their own lives, relishing the scene-stealing dramatic potential as they alternate between eye-rolling ecstasy and tearful misery. More sharply than any suffragette pamphlet of the period, Coward shows the plight of women trapped in male-defined relationships, made bearable only by adulterous fantasy. Cochran wisely pitches the performances just at the edge of hysteria, thus underscoring the deadly boredom behind the opulent exterior."