THE BUZZ

GLENN GAMBOA; ROBERT KAHN | Newsday Staff Writers

September 3, 2006

The time is right for Beyonce's "Ring the Alarm," the second single from her album. (Getty Images)

THE divas are coming!

THE divas are coming!

Get set for diva gridlock.

With new releases from Beyoncé, Janet Jackson and Fergie arriving this month to duke it out with last month's offerings from Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton, and the still-hot Nelly Furtado, Ciara and Cassie, there's a whole lot of ladies trying to get some attention these days.

To complicate matters, most are taking no chances about staking out their share of the airwaves. Though it's unusual for superstar artists to release two singles before the album comes out, Beyoncé quickly trotted out "Ring the Alarm" as soon as the first single from "B'Day" (Columbia/Sony Urban) started to slip. Jackson is doing the same thing, releasing the dance-oriented "So Excited" last week, as the first single "Call on Me" starts to pick up steam.

Mathew Knowles, Beyoncé's father and manager, said in a statement last week that he even plans to release a third single soon. "For this album, we have a unique strategy," he says. "Rather than concern ourselves with purely chart positioning, we are focusing on the combined audiences who are listening and are aware of the singles on the album. ... This is a unique, creative body of work on "B'Day" and every song is a potential single."

-Glenn Gamboa

'High' hopes for move to Brooklyn

In Nick Hornby's 1995 novel "High Fidelity," the action takes place in a vintage record store in London, where Rob Fleming, an obsessive 30-something Englishman, has just been dumped. Five years later, the story was adapted into a popular film with John Cusack as a proprietor - renamed Rob

Gordon - of a flailing record store in Chicago. In 2006, as a Broadway musical version prepares to begin previews Nov. 20 at the Imperial Theatre, "High Fidelity" has relocated once again - to Brooklyn.

"We don't know Chicago, so we didn't want to set it there," said David Lindsay-Abaire ("Rabbit Hole"), the Boerum Hill playwright doing his first book of a musical, which boasts a score by Tom Kitt and lyrics by Amanda Green. "Brooklyn, we knew well."

Lindsay-Abaire moved the story eastward with Hornby's blessing, after reading an interview in which the novelist talked about how much he had liked the Chicago setting of the movie, and how the screenwriter and Cusack "had made the story their own."

In the new musical, the exact location of the record store is left purposefully vague, though the script says it's "somewhere in the heart of Brooklyn ... in a neighborhood past hope." A neighborhood in Brooklyn beyond hope? May we suggest the Top 5 reasons Lindsay-Abaire should have moved the action to Queens, instead?

-Robert Kahn

Liotta and Scorsese still thick as thieves

CBS has struck a deal to show the premiere of its new crime drama "Smith" with only a couple of commercial breaks, and the agreement is positively bursting with synergy, Zap2it.com reports.

The series, which stars Ray Liotta as a professional thief who keeps his life secret from his wife (Virginia Madsen), is produced by Warner Bros. TV. The premiere will be sponsored by the forthcoming movie "The Departed," which is being released by Warner Bros.

"The Departed" is directed by Martin Scorsese, who, you might recall, directed Liotta in his breakout "Goodfellas" role in 1990.

The Warner Bros. sponsorship of the "Smith" premiere solves a scheduling issue for CBS. The show's pilot runs nearly an hour without commercials - as opposed to the 42 to 44 minutes for your average TV drama - so the network would have needed to make substantial cuts to the episode, limit the ad breaks or run a 90-minute premiere.

Series creator John Wells wasn't about to do the first option, and since it's a 10 p.m. show, a 90-minute premiere might have been problematic. Thus, the deal with "The Departed." "Smith" also stars Simon Baker ("The Guardian"), Amy Smart ("Crank"), Jonny Lee Miller ("Aeon Flux"), Franky G ("Jonny Zero"), Shohreh Aghdashloo ("24") and Chris Bauer ("The Wire"). It premieres Sept. 19. "The Departed" hits theaters Oct. 6.