HELP! - Need Opinions on BEST Diva Songs!

Diva's Lament is the first that comes to my mind.

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Any song sung by any role that Patti has played.

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Glitter and Be Gay (Candide), Everybody's Girl (Steel Pier)

Look at the Leading Ladies Concert DVD haha

And I Am Telling You from Dreamgirls

What I Did For Love from A Chorus Line

Memory from Cats

(Diva songs are like Lays potato chips, no one can eat just one)

Send in the Clowns from A Little Night Music

Cabaret and Maybe This Time from Cabaret

All That Jazz from Chicago

With One Look and As If We Never Said Goodbye from Sunset Boulevard

People from Funny Girl

I Could Have Danced All Night from My Fair Lady

I'm Still Here from Follies

Ladies Who Lunch from Company

There's No Business Like Show Business from Annie Get Your Gun

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Lot's Wife - Caroline, or Change
Back to Before - Ragtime
The Ladies Who Lunch - Company

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"one needs to have attained diva status with the real b*llbusters (e.g., And I Am Telling You) before they can assume permission to divatize a ballad like "Send In the Clowns".

Define "diva". Dame Judi Dench sang Send in the Clowns in the London revival and performed it better than anyone else before or since. (And that hack Barbra Streisand also performed it on one of her Broadway albums).

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I vote for Meadowlark and Colored Lights. I was woefully unaware of the latter until hearing Julia Murney sing the pants off it at that Kander and Ebb benefit "Come to the Cabaret" a few months back. Breathtaking.

"As If We Never Said Goodbye" from Sunset Boulevard?

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> define diva

not sure (it's a little like the i'll-know-it-when-i-see-it definition for pornography) ... but isn't "Dame" just "diva" in british english?

maybe it's just a vague question. but, seriously: if the question is, "what are good songs for a diva to sing?" then i stand down. but if it's "what are good songs for making a diva?" (which, possibly incorrectly, is how i took it), then some of those songs just aren't on the roadmap to divadom.

the dench example kind of makes the point -- singing "send in the clowns" didn't make judi a diva ... being sung by judi granted "send in the clowns" entry into the canon.

not sure that made it a whole lot clearer, but divas get a different repertoire than aspiring divas. oooh ... that makes more sense -- i'll go with that. final answer.

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Updated On: 6/23/09 at 10:35 PM

One of the greatest archetyal diva songs ever has surely got to be "With One Look" from "Sunset Boulevard"!

Anything Goes and Everything's Coming Up Roses.