Chris Noth and Whoopi Goldberg.

When Chris Noth invites you out on Valentine’s Day weekend, you don’t say no. At least that was the Transom’s theory as we set out Sunday night, looking to get friendly with the actor best known for his role as Mr. Big on Sex and the City—and, oh yeah, with the rain forests—at a benefit auction for the Rainforest Action Network hosted by Mr. Noth at his Midtown East venue, The Cutting Room.

Casually dressed in blue jeans and an untucked white button-up, Mr. Noth made his way along the red carpet, sneaking sips of dark liquor. Love or something was in the air, and the Transom caught Mr. Noth’s eye from across the way. Drunk on good intentions, if not yet on booze, the strong-browed actor, like every other man in attendance, had only one thing on his mind: the environment.

Mr. Noth was sounding a bit like some Glengarry Glen Ross character—if that character were frothing at the mouth over green energy, that is. “We have to do radical transformation of energy and find ways to make people understand that green energy isn’t some archaic, eccentric idea,” he said, “but a place people can profit from, and so we make profit, but with principles.”

And then suddenly Mr. Noth morphed into some red-faced basketball coach giving a halftime speech. He was infused with passion and urgency. “Get up, get active,” he said, now singling out the Transom (be still our heart). “Make your president do what you elected him to do. Stop sitting on your ass and expecting it to come to you. We have to fight for it.”

For our part, we were ready to grab climate change and deforestation by their ozone-ruining necks and squeeze them into submission. Or at the very least hit our foul shots. Alas, as man of the night, Mr. Noth had to run off to pose for some photos.

Feeling a little stood up, we watched then as guests piled in, stopping at the bar for glasses of red before being escorted to their assigned seats. Flirtation and friendly bidding were in order. And over by the paparazzi section, in the exposed brick lobby across the room, the Transom was awarded a full glass of positivity—or maybe it was bourbon.

Underneath the shadow of a guitar-entwined chandelier, we managed to chat with the unmistakable Whoopi Goldberg, co-host of the evening, who for some reason was holding a Starbucks cup that read “Gary” on the side. Unlike Mr. Noth, Ms. Goldberg took a more self-reflective tack when discussing the theme of the evening.

“The younger generation doesn’t need to be told, they’re already on top of it. It’s us,” the 57-year-old actress said. “We’re not dinosaurs. It’s just reminding ourselves not to be too lazy, and it’s hard to do, because we work our asses off and we get lazy.”

As if to defend her record, Ms. Goldberg listed off all the projects she is currently part of, including her work with AIDS awareness and pro-choice organizations. “I do a lot of shit,” she said. And then she began to sound an awful lot like some sidewalk doomsayer.

“Crazy shit is happening,” she said. “Now some of it is because of global warming, but asteroids are falling out of the sky, the fucking pope left. We’re dealing with a lot, so I kind of think it’ll just take a minute.”

The gavel sounded as auctioned items—like Sting’s autographed guitar and a wild art piece painted live on stage by Jessica Gorlicky—found new homes. We soon found ourselves near R.A.N. founder Randy Hayes, who said he has already been arrested 19 times for civil disobedience.

“You have to deliver tough love sometimes to these governments and these transnational corporations that are cutting down the rain forest,” he said, with the hint of a delinquent smile. What else was in store for the Rainforest Action Network, we wondered?

“We have a series of house parties across the country,” said Mr. Hayes. “Well, some of them are really quite fun.”

Hmm. Transom does love a good house party, but whatever would we talk about?

This is the crux of That Championship Season, which debuted at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in 1972, was transferred to Broadway later that year, and the next spring won both the best play Tony and the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

It is also the story of That Championship Season, which opened in a star-studded but disappointingly lackluster revival at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre Sunday night. Jason Miller's play was once a champion--it became a well-regarded 1982 film, with another all-star cast--but what's now onstage at the Jacobs is forgettable, maudlin, overly tidy and dramatically unconvincing. Like its characters, it has reached middle age, and like them, middle age doesn't look good on it.

The scene is a worn Victorian living room someplace in blue-collar Pennsylvania. It's 1972, and four members of the 1952 state-champion high-school basketball team are gathered at Coach's house to commemorate that great win, to drink and brag, as they do every year. They were, we're told, a legendary squad.

Twenty years later, they're still tight, big men in their small city. George is the mayor, up for reelection, mildly corrupt and mildly competent. Phil is a successful businessman, making money by polluting the city, paying George with campaign donations so the government looks the other way, driving fast cars and sleeping around. James is dedicated but dutiful, George's campaign manager and a junior-high principal, feeling trapped in his job. Tom, his brother, is a charming alcoholic who bounces from city to city. And then there's Coach, to whom they all still turn for guidance, a petty but inspiring bigot with no family of his own, obsessed with the past, from that championship to Teddy Roosevelt to Joe McCarthy. As the evening progresses, they'll get drunk, reveal truths, confess doubts, hug and make up. It's a play about simple men adrift in a rapidly changing America, astonished and dismayed that a Jewish environmentalist could potentially unseat good old Mayor George.

Ah, the past. When That Championship Season opened at the Public in 1972, Clive Barnes called it in The New York Times "the perfect Broadway play of the season, perfectly acted and perfectly staged" (with the asterisk that "it happens not to be on Broadway"). So how come it's now so far from perfect?

Perhaps it's because the play is so predictable. From searing classics like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to amiable trifles like A Perfect Future, which recently came and went Off Broadway, the drunken-night-of-revelation genre is well worn. None of the revelations are particularly surprising, as the script dutifully rotates through its players, giving each an opportunity for his crisis. In fact, the only surprise might be that these men, who betray each other in turn, inexplicably end the night as friends again.

Perhaps it's because the world has changed so much. America in 2011 is going through profound transformations, economically, socially, demographically, that are not dissimilar to those buffeting northeastern Pennsylvania in 1972. But in facing our own problems, it is hard to have sympathy for a bunch of corrupt racists, high-school jocks who discover a winning season doesn't guarantee a winning life.

And perhaps it's because this Championship cast never melds into an effective whole. Clive Barnes called the original ensemble "simply the best of the season," and maybe if the current group could become a convincing band of brothers, its disintegration would be meaningful. But director Gregory Mosher, who did such excellent work last season in A View From the Bridge, allows his high-profile cast to display such a range of acting styles that the men barely appear to be in the same play, and certainly not on the same team.

The estimable Brian Cox is Coach, and he plays the character that represents the past as an actor from another era. His performance is all oration and sputtering, a high-energy vaudeville routine disconnected from the others' naturalism. Jason Patric, whose father wrote the play, portrays Tom as a 21st-century ironist, a wise drunk who comments on the scene with wry detachment, never making himself present, not even when he's the focus of attention.

In the middle are Kiefer Sutherland as James, Chris Noth as Phil and Jim Gaffigan as the mayor, who all manage to get it right: They effectively portray stolid, all-American Real Men, from a time when all-American Real Men took the role seriously. Sure, Mr. Sutherland is miscast--Jack Bauer shouldn't try for nebbish--but he does all right. Mr. Noth is spot-on as the slick, rich nihilist, a role for which he has plenty of practice.

The revelation is Mr. Gaffigan, best known as a comic and making his Broadway debut. He's charismatic while playing a loser, sensitive in playing a boor. He, here, is perhaps the only champion.

There are many things to admire about Good People, a very funny and very serious drama about class and conflict in Boston that opened in a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre last week. Chief among them is its very good people.

It is written by David Lindsay-Abaire, whose Rabbit Hole debuted at the Friedman five seasons ago, won the Pulitzer, and became a film this winter. It stars Frances McDormand, who has a big enough name to help lure ticket-buyers while also being an excellent theater actress, here giving an anguished and moving performance as Margie, with a hard G, the Irish Catholic single mother at the center of the play. And it is directed by Daniel Sullivan, who, as he did with Donald Margulies' Time Stands Still at the same theater last year, assembles a talented and coherent cast and uses them to make a good play great.

This is not the emotional tour de force that is Rabbit Hole, but it is a compelling and clear-eyed work, a portrait of proud and tribal South Boston, a struggling woman who knows she's stuck there and one guy--her high-school boyfriend, now a doctor--who made it out. It's a smart exploration of American class divides, so often ignored or smoothed over, and it raises unanswerable question about what makes a good person.

But the greatest pleasure comes in just watching the actors: Ms. McDormand as Margie, both steely and vulnerable; Tate Donovan as the ex-boyfriend-made-good, a charmer with the old-neighborhood edge buried under his Ivy League veneer; Renée Elise Goldsberry as his wife, a privileged woman with her own problems, trying hard not to condescend to an interloper she'd though was the help; Becky Ann Baker as Margie's best friend, tough as nails; Patrick Carroll as the lifelong acquaintance forced to fire her; and, most memorably, the incomparable Estelle Parsons as her blowsy, canny battle axe of a landlady.

It is, you might say, one of the best ensembles of the season.

editorial@observer.com

A stampede of new end-of-summer films arrives next week in time for Labor Day, and my vacation getaway—too many to adequately cover in the space I’ve been allotted. So I’m recommending one of them a week early. High on the list, there is My One and Only, a colorfully written, expertly directed and beautifully acted romp about the early life of actor George Hamilton that is guaranteed to make you feel warm all over. Just when I was beginning to give up on Renée Zellweger, she returns to glory in the role of a flighty, eccentric, often married and sadly fading Scarlett O’Hara with two teenage sons to raise who sets off on a road trip across America in search of a rich new husband. Get ready to beam with joy.

Set in the flamboyant ’50s, it begins in New York when Anne Deveraux returns to her swanky apartment from a hard day of shopping and finds her two-timing, Texas-born society bandleader husband (Kevin Bacon) in bed with another woman. Fiddle-dee-dee. The pouty, impetuous Anne packs up her two boys, George (Logan Lerman) and his older stepbrother, Robbie (Mark Rendall); hits the road to Boston in their flashy new Cadillac Eldorado convertible; and sets out to find a benefactor who will keep them all in the style to which they’ve become accustomed. From Boston to Pittsburgh, St. Louis and, finally, Los Angeles, the flaky Anne gets cheated, robbed and heartbroken by a series of poor choices for husband material, as she tries vainly to be a mother and a magnetic lover, and cling to her lost youth in the process. Oblivious to age and her dwindling talent for attracting wealthy men, Mom’s conquests lead from one disaster to the next while the boys look on with sympathy and terror. Into their lives comes the heir to an art fortune (David Koechner), who steals money from her purse in the middle of an expensive dinner date and sticks her with the check; then Mom’s third husband, an iron-fisted Army colonel and military wacko (Chris Noth) who dedicates himself to fighting the Communist menace; an old socialite boyfriend (Eric McCormack) who leads her on and then deserts her for a younger woman. In St. Louis, she compromises her ideals and gets a job in a paint store, and when business improves overnight, the owner proposes. At last, the perfect man. There’s only one problem. He’s already married and on his way to jail for bigamy. Whenever things go sour, she packs up the boys and they move to another town. All Mom wants is security. All George wants is a normal life. All Robbie wants is a movie career. No wonder the boys end up acting as surrogate parents to their ditzy mother (even bailing her out after she innocently accepts a drink from an admiring undercover detective in a hotel bar and gets falsely arrested for prostitution), and they raise each other. It’s quite a task. George is a handsome, intelligent kid with a voracious appetite for books who keeps diaries of his unorthodox experiences. Robbie is a flaming queen in training who knits and wears his mother’s pearls. Once they land in Hollywood, Mom finds work as an extra in a movie western and charms the director into auditioning Robbie for the role of a cowboy. Hand on hip, mincing to the rancher’s daughter, he is both hilarious and pathetic enough for his kid brother to offer a few pointers. George is so good that he gets the part; Robbie is happily relegated to wigs, makeup and costumes; and the unexpected new family star gets photographed on the set of his first picture, with a name on the back of his chair that reads “George Hamilton.”

I admit I was surprised by this revelation, but it’s no spoiler. My One and Only is based on two books of Mr. Hamilton’s memoirs, and he’s also the executive producer. The facts are highly embellished (no Tennessee childhood; no affair with his father’s next wife; no romance with Lynda Bird Johnson or marriage to Alana Stewart; and no perpetual suntan). But George’s father was society bandleader “Spike” Hamilton; his mother was glamorous Ann Stevens; and half-brother Robbie, whose real name was Bill, became an interior decorator. George did begin his film career in 1952, when he was 13, in a Clark Gable western called Lone Star, and went on to fame playing Hank Williams, Evel Knievel and Dracula. From barely managing to survive every crisis to supporting Ann and Bill in luxury for the rest of their lives, George Hamilton lived an unconventional life that was destined to be filmed, and there are still enough subplots left over for a sequel. The careful script by Charlie Peters turns a dysfunctional family into friends you wouldn’t mind knowing.

For any part of My One and Only to work, great acting is not only an asset but a requirement. Director Richard Loncraine gets immaculate performances from all of the men and especially the two boys. Mark Rendall knows just when to reign in the campy aspects of Robbie’s effeminacy and keep him overwhelmingly likable, and in the pivotal role of George, young Logan Lerman is a true revelation with blazing promise. Tough but vulnerable, Ms. Zellweger is a lonely, misunderstood Southern belle who is infuriating, adorable and touching at the same time—one of those little extra people in life who never fits in, a piece left out of the puzzle in the rain. Quirky and mercurial, she invests society’s definition of a lousy mother with a big, radiant heart. It’s her best role in years, and she wears it like a form-fitting pelisse.

[Rex Reed awarded this movie 3 and 1/2 stars, not 2 1/2 as originally printed. The Observer regrets the error.]  

Mr. Noth is in a suit and red tie. Ms. Margulies wears a pencil skirt, a blue herringbone blazer and pearls. The camera closes in on her face, which is pale and still.

“Good morning. An hour ago I resigned as state attorney of Cook County,” says Mr. Noth’s character, named Peter Florrick. “I have never abused my office. … But at the same time I need to atone for my personal failings with my wife, Alicia, and our two children. The money used for these transactions was mine and mine alone. No public funds were ever utilized. But I do admit to a failure of judgment in private dealings with these women.”

In March of last year, executive producers Robert and Michelle King (they’re married) were watching Silda Spitzer on TV as her husband, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, resigned from office.

“The Spitzers were prominent, but it was really the spring of scandals,” Mr. King told the Transom. “They all had the same interesting character in it, which was not the husband, but the wives, who were almost used as props. There was nothing more worthy of high drama than what was going through these wives’ heads.”

Mr. King didn’t understand why politicians’ wives stayed with their husbands; his wife argued for the complexity of the situation. These disagreements led to a script about a once independent and successful political wife who faces a philandering husband and returns to work as a defense attorney. By summer, they were pitching the show to ABC, which passed, and to CBS.

Ms. Margulies remembered the inescapable footage of the Spitzer resignation.

“If you went to the gym, it was there; if you went online, it was there,” she told the Transom by phone from her New York apartment. “There wasn’t one person who didn’t scream out, ‘Why are you there?’ We were all so quick to judge her.”

After Ms. Margulies met with producers Ridley Scott and David Zucker and accepted the part, she studied the humiliating press conferences of the Clintons, the Spitzers and the McGreeveys. “Every single woman that I watched standing behind her man aged 10 years in a span of two months,” she said. “Then afterward, you see them bounce back. Silda Spitzer was in Vogue recently, and she couldn’t look better. She is running a hedge fund and she seems to have the world at her feet.” (Ms. Spitzer, who works for Metropolitan Capital Advisors, declined to comment.) “In order for this to work, everyone had to be in love with him,” said Ms. Margulies. “All these guys that have fallen from grace, they’re so magnetic. Bill Clinton, I’m sorry, but when all that happened, I kind of understood it. I mean, he’s gorgeous!”  

The show will follow Alicia Florrick (Ms. Margulies) in the aftermath of the very public sex scandal. In one scene, her teenage daughter calls and says, “A girl at school said that Dad slept with a hooker my age.” In another, she watches the TV at her office as news is reported that the “celebrity call girl,” who is blond and does not look at all like Ashley Dupre, is writing a memoir.

“The premise of the pilot is that now you can go anywhere with it,” said Ms. Margulies. “And now we can just start peeling her like an onion because eventually she’ll just snap.”

Mr. King spoke highly of Mr. Noth as the wayward politician. “There is something charming about him—he pursued it with a little bit of Clinton,” he said.

And the cast and producers were thrilled when South Carolina’s governor, Mark Sanford, admitted to having an affair with an Argentine woman just a few weeks ago.

“You should have seen some of the memos going around from agent to manager to producer, like, ‘Could we ask for better publicity?’” Ms. Margulies said. “But I really applaud Jenny Sanford’s reaction to the media; she was so unbelievably classy, as were Silda and Hillary. These women are smart. They’re not wallflowers.

“The great question is, as women become more present in political arenas, are we suddenly going to find out about their affairs?” Ms. Margulies mused. She thought about it for a moment and started laughing. “Actually, I doubt it. We’re just too busy.” 

A city marshal shuttered the onetime celebrity hotspot on April 9 over some $113,727 in unpaid rent, court records show.

In an affidavit, Mr. Ashman said he was "blind-sided" by the eviction. "We do owe money," he stated. "We need to be open for business to pay owed money."

A judge denied his plea for a stay of eviction earlier this week.

Opened with much fanfare in the former Nell's space in 2006, Mr. Ashman's club benefited from a star-studded support network, which included Yankees pitcher David Wells, model Petra Nemcova, and actors Chris Noth and Jesse Bradford, who "would contribute money and/or lend their name to the club in exchange for an ownership interest," according to court records.

Mr. Ashman also enlisted socialite Ann Dexter-Jones to help design the space and prominent scenester Samantha Ronson to help promote it.

Yet, the place seemed eternally mired in legal woes. The landlord filed suit against the club a total of six times since 2006, housing court records show.

In 2005, when the club was known as NA, investors unsuccessfully attempted to oust Mr. Ashman as managing partner for overspending "approximately 163% over the amount budgeted in the business plan," despite the fact the club was operating only three days a week, not seven, as originally planned, according to court papers.

In a subsequent settlement, Mr. Ashman was permitted to stay on as company president under the condition that the club would become profitable or else be sold to the highest bidder.

The celebrities posed for pictures with cardboard posters of Sarah Jessica Parker (despite the fact that the actress herself was giving interviews nearby in a floor-length gray gown). Inside, large groups of women in short cocktail dresses and heels did the same. The occasional man looked either shell-shocked or gay.

Anna Wintour and André Leon Talley arrived and took their seats. Then it was Jason Lewis, a.k.a. Smith Jerrod. By the time Chris Noth strolled down the aisle in a khaki suit, the audience could take it no longer: A loud cheer went up and the women leaped to their feet in a flurry of flashbulbs. Sarah Jessica Parker soon made her way down the aisle at Stage Left, eliciting even louder cheers. One could have been forgiven for thinking this was a very stylish, estrogen-infused rock concert.

"I've gotten calls from people I actually thought were dead," said Toby Emmerich, head of New Line Cinema, from the podium, explaining that this was "definitely the most sought-after ticket" in New York tonight (and that it was in fact a benefit for the Fund for Public Schools).

Michael Patrick King, the director, told the crowd he'd known the weather wouldn't thwart the party because his Irish Catholic mother had been praying in her hotel all day: "Dear Jesus, please don't let it rain on my son's big sex party!"

He introduced the supporting cast in the audience—everyone from Miranda's housekeeper, Magda, played by Lynn Cohen, to Jennifer Hudson, playing the new character of Carrie's assistant—and then the four stars (all of whom looked svelter and younger than in the actual film). Ms. Parker made a brief, sincere speech about turning the film over "to its rightful owners, New York City."

Then, she ran—ran—back up the aisle she'd descended only moments before, and, as the audience held its breath, re-emerged atop a center aisle and took her seat. More gasps and cheers.

The film itself was meaty and satisfying, funnier than the actual series and full of opportunities for viewers to applaud and roar with laughter, notably a scene in which Charlotte (Kristin Davis) poops her pants after drinking the water in Mexico on Carrie's honeymoon (which, needless to say, involves all four women and no men). The audience went crazy. (Our critic Rex Reed, not so much.)

And if they seemed at first lukewarm on the film's inevitable happy ending, they eventually got on board and cheered loudly as Carrie renounced the materialism that had provided most of the film's sentimental moments up to then (people come to New York seeking labels and love, she'd said at the beginning in a voice-over. And the latter is harder to come by).

Afterward, in the women's bathroom line, the consensus was that the film had been amazing. A 20-something Columbia grad student with a nose ring named Leona explained she'd just moved here Friday from Washington State.

"I've only seen 15 minutes of the show, and I got a free ticket to come tonight"—someone offered it to her on her lunch break, she said—"and I decided, it's my fourth day in New York, might as well go!"

"That's New York!" said a middle-aged woman with ringlet curls, overhearing. She'd "loved every second from beginning to end," she added. "Just the way it was supposed to be."

Leona said she was going to send the popcorn box to friends back home "with love from New York."

Sighed another 20-something brunette named Lauren, standing nearby in a black dress: "I really believed Big cared for her. I never did in the series."

Sex and the City’s Mr. Big just welcomed his own Mr. Little. Actor Chris Noth and longtime girlfriend Tara Wilson, who named their 7-pound, 10-counce son Orion Christopher, have already received well-wishes from S.A.T.C. co-star Sarah Jessica Parker.

“I'm thrilled for him because I think first of all he's going to make a wonderful, wonderful father,” the 42-year-old actress told an ET reporter at the Sundance Film Festival, where Ms. Parker is promoting her new film Smart People—a romantic comedy co-staring Dennis Quaid and Thomas Haden Church. “He found a lovely lady to have a child with. It's the perfect time for him and I think he's very ready,” she added.