Stop me if you've heard this one before. It's the one about the bandits - Sicilian, as like as not - who storm a cocktail party and make off with a fistful of captives, hoping to earn themselves a king's ransom, writes Arminta Wallace.
Most of the kidnap victims are cowed and submissive, but one woman is unimpressed by the machine-guns and the rough treatment and all the rest of it. She demands to see the bandit leader. "You have to let me go at once," she tells him. "I'm X, the famous diva, and I'm due on stage tonight."
"Oh, yeah?" says the bandit leader. "You're X, the famous diva - and I'm Billy the Kid. Nice try, lady. Get back in there with the others." He considers himself a cultured man, however. Maybe she really is a singer, he thinks. This bothers him. He wanted to ruffle a few political and banking feathers, not pick on artists and musicians. On the other hand, maybe she's faking, just to get away.
Eventually he goes back to see her and says, "OK, if you're really a diva, I'll let you go. But you have to prove it. Sing something."
The diva draws herself up to her full five foot nothing. "Sing?" she demands. "Sing? In this filthy, dusty hole? Sing? Without my accompanist? Without an orchestra? Without having my hair done?"
The bandit leader sighs and turns to his men. "She's a diva all right, lads," he says. "Better let her go."
The point of the story is that while it may be difficult to define a diva, it's easy to recognise one. And it's not about the voice. Not really. You can't, obviously, be a diva without a good voice. But there are plenty of very good singers, and very few divas. Divadom comprises an elusive blend of glamour, heartbreak, music and frocks. Oh - and drama, of course. But drama, by itself, doesn't make a diva either. Look at Britney Spears and the head-shaving episode. In another place, on another head, such behaviour might have been that of a diva. In Britney's case, though, it just looked like despair.
Divas do defiance, not despair. My favourite diva story concerns the black American opera singer Jessye Norman. Larger than life in every sense of the phrase, she was once, the legend has it, doing a lengthy overland train stint across the US between engagements. To make the journey more palatable, her PR people had reserved a sleeping car, and the railway company had appointed a small deputation to meet the star and escort her into her temporary quarters.
One of them picked up the singer's overnight bag and went ahead of her into the carriage. When the diva made to follow, she couldn't get through the door. She twisted this way and that, even turning around to try and manoeuvre in backwards; but it was no good. "Perhaps, Miss Norman," suggested the mortified railway official, "if you tried. . .sideways?"
"Honey," replied the singer, without missing a beat, "when you're my size, there ain't no sideways."
The point of this story is that divas are always a class act. The other thing about divas is that they cross all, or at least most, musical boundaries. Musical theatre can boast more of them than any other musical form, despite opera's claim to diva fame. The blues has produced its share. So has country music - if you count Dolly Parton as a diva, which I most definitely do. Even pop music has produced one or two. Remember the wonderful Dana International, the Israeli trans-sexual singer who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1998 with the song Viva La Divaand a frock to die for? Rock chicks, on the other hand, tend not to make good divas, with the possible exception of Madonna.
As a matter of fact we're rather short on active divas in the world at present - which may be the reason why, when Barbra Streisand did a "comeback" tour last year at the age of 64, she broke box-office records all over the shop. A major part of the show was Streisand's merciless send-up of George W. Bush - and her spirited responses to hecklers who objected. Think Eric Cantona in stilettos, and you get the picture. Divas don't conform, and they don't, as the line from Gone With The Windput it, give a damn. It might be the diva credo, that line.
One dame who does give a damn, however, is the American singer Kim Criswell. Criswell, who has herself been described as a "diva extraordinaire", has done just about everything there is to do on Broadway, from Annie Get Your Gunthrough The Threepenny Operato Side By Side By Sondheim. Now she has put together a tribute concert entitled Hollywood Divas: Legends of the Silver Screen, which will play at the National Concert Hall this Wednesday and The Helix on Thursday.
Accompanied by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and Big Band under the baton of John Wilson, Criswell will deliver a programme which includes everything from Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friendthrough Don't Rain On My Paradeto Over The Rainbowand will pay tribute to divas as diverse as Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minelli, Marilyn Monroe, Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn. Diva extraordinaire, indeed. As if there was any other kind.