Diva/Mensch pair for Jan 28, 2026

The Tony for Best Musical in 1955 went to The Pajama Game.

Diva: the show

Mensch: the idea of writing a show about a labor strike

This happens more often than you realize - - they took a serious subject (a strike in a pajama factory) and embedded it so deeply into an entertaining Broadway musical that the audience didn't realize that they were seeing a show about labor relations. Something similar happened with one of my favorite movies last year, Sinners - - it was such a fun vampire movie that you hardly noticed you were being confronted with hard truths about being a Black person in Mississippi in the 1930s.

Here are the two leads in that show, John Raitt and Janis Paige, doing "There Once Was a Man" on The Ed Sullivan Show. Raitt is one of the greatest singers ever and Paige is very appealing. She gets a little pitchy now and then and her rhythm is resolutely off but I'll chalk that up to being on TV and not in the theater.