Judith Light was in a conga line of her handsome male co-stars and vamped it up for the photographers at the glittery opening night party of Lombardi at the Edison Ballroom on October 21. Lombardi, a bio-drama by Eric Simonson, is based on the Lombardi biography When Pride Still Mattered by David Maraniss, about legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi. The play, which opened at the Circle in the Square Theater, stars Dan Lauria (the gruff father on The Wonder Years) as the driven Hall of Fame coach, and Light as his wife Marie, who gets most of the funny lines—dry and acerbic zingers that she tosses while holding a martini. Getting laughs is nothing new for Light, who is best known as Angela Bower, the uptight advertising executive on the 1984 ABC sitcom Who’s the Boss, which co-starred Tony Danza as her housekeeper, and squeezed maximum sexual frisson out of whether they would get it on or not (they eventually did) during the show’s eight-year run.

But at the opening, the unlikely combination of Broadway and football mingled on the red carpet as real-life football players Jim Taylor posed with Chris Sullivan, the actor who played him, and another football player, Dave Robinson, shook hands with his 20-something actor version, Robert Christopher Riley.

The rest of the cast, all men, includes Keith Nobbs as a hot-shot reporter and Paul Hornung as Green Packer Bill Dawes. The scrimmage on the red carpet included the usual mash up photographers and reporters chasing actors. Our favorite photo shot moment was watching Lauria with his arms around Light pose for the photographers. We had a three decades flashback to when Light playing a bored housewife who became a prostitute in One Light to Live and Lauria played her pimp. The memorable storyline and an over-the-top courthouse scene, with Light cried hysterically to keep her friend from being convicted of killing her pimp, earned Light her first Emmy in 1980.

Katie Finneran, the Tony Award winning actress from Promises, Promises, spoke to us on the red carpet and praised Light’s performance. “What she brought to the character, she grounded the whole play. Not only was she hysterically funny, what she did with those scenes between them that wasn’t in the words, wasn’t in the dialogue was heartbreaking,” she said. “That’s a stunning actress!” Finneran turns 40 in January, the same time she expects her first child, and she said the roles get better, on the stage. “That’s why I love the theater so much,” she said. “Older women are so much more interesting anyway cause we found our voice. We’ve had our pain. Older women have such stories to tell. That’s where the real storytelling is, with people who have lived a life,” she said. “I’ve always felt 40 anyway. Even when I was 12.”

Light, who is 61 and looks two decades younger, was finally done with her opening night duties and she slipped into a banquette to talk to Moore. Looking sexy and sleek in a black, St. John gown that accentuated her size 2 figure and long, graceful neck, she talked about her career, getting older, and testosterone.

“It’s really an extraordinary experience,” she said, about performing with an all-male cast. She said she told them, “I have rarely worked with so many men who have such a well-integrated sense of their femininity and masculinity. They are poets. They are gentlemen. They are funny. They are rabblerousers. They include me in their jousting,” she said, rattling off praise for all of her co-stars, including director Thomas Kail, and all of the designers, who are also men. “I didn’t know I was going to love it this much,” she said of working with all the men.

To get into her role she decided she didn’t want to imitate Marie or make her a caricature in any way so she avoided tapes except to listen a little bit to her voice, which Light described as a “regal New Jersey accent.” She said she let herself be guided by the script, the director and “my relationship to Dan and my relationship to the other guys and I just was very patient, which I’m not normally, and letting it unfold.”