Two shakeups to report on the Great White Way.

One is that Urinetown'the hit written by Chicago boys Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis, only recently profiled by yours truly in PerformInk'is looking at the end of its remarkable two-year run in the Henry Miller Theatre. The show remains popular, but the theatre is owned by the Durst Family, who will shortly be giving the valuable real estate over to the free market.

'We knew when we went into the theatre that it would be for a limited run,' is what Urinetown producer Michael Rego said to everybody. 'We first thought it would be only six months, and we would either make it or break it in that amount of time.'

The looming final curtain (closing day will be mid-February) created a fresh bunch of goofy headlines: 'You Are Now Leaving Urinetown,' (Playbill), 'Urinetown Dries Up' (various), and 'Urinetown Flush With Profit' (Variety).

Profit? Yup'according to Variety theatre scribe Robert Hoefler, 'The big news is that Urinetown has recouped its $3.7 million investment. And its producers think the tuner has another year to run.'

The trick is finding another theatre for it, and the money to move it.

The other shakeup on Broadway was a little stranger'actress Jasmine Guy, best known for her work as the stuck-up Whitley on 'A Different World,' took an abrupt exit from her role in the new Richard Greenberg play The Violet Hour just weeks before it opened.

'[Guy] took ill after the first act of the play's Oct. 23 performance, and an understudy appeared in Act 2,' reported Kenneth Jones in Playbill, holding back'as others did not'on the details of Guy's apparently bizarre onstage behavior. 'Robin Miles played the second act.'

Good luck for Miles, as the marvelously named Joan E. Vadeboncoeur noted in her entertainment column in the Syracuse New York Post-Standard. 'On went Miles and won the role permanently,' she reported. 'It's a lucky break, since Miles once turned down an original role in Rent to play Olivia in the fall 1995 mounting of Twelfth Night, a Syracuse Stage gig lasting only six weeks. Rent continues to play on Broadway, as well as tour the country.'

Just Say No-Show

CBS caught more flack than it was expecting'and still less than it deserved'for ditching out on its 'controversial' miniseries The Reagans under pressure from conservative groups. The groups, including the Republican National Committee, protested that the show portrayed the dissembling, homosexual-hating former president in a negative light.

'Obviously there was a lot of pressure from the right before they had even seen the movie,' complained network president Les Moonves at Yale on Nov. 5 in a speech carried in the New Haven Register and then picked up by the Associated Press. 'After we made the decision, the creative community is saying we buckled under to the right. So it was one of those decisions where, no matter which way we turned, it was the wrong decision.'

Nice try, Les. You sissied out. Just listen to the chorus of critics:

'Moonves knows his bosses at Viacom''the conglomerate that owns CBS''are lobbying Congress against action restricting local station ownership by conglomerates like Viacom,' wrote James O. Goldsborough in the San Diego Union Tribune, calling Moonves's move 'an act of unique professional cowardice.'

'CBS and its parent company, Viacom, gave their reputation for courage and independence a kind of toxic shower Tuesday,' was the heady metaphor rolled out by Brian Lambert in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Lambert found CBS's perfunctory denial of outside influence ('This decision is based solely on our reaction to seeing the final film, not the controversy that erupted around a draft of the script') especially despicable.

'This may not be the first blow to freedom triggered by media consolidation, but it certainly stands as the latest example with the highest profile. Viacom owns CBS, and stockholders have a say now in creative content, however indirectly it may seem,' wrote Michael Ventre for MSNBC, the online site owned by NBC, which is in turn a subsidiary of General Electric.

Speaking of synergy, CBS didn't actually axe the series, it just gave it back to Viacom to shunt over to Showtime, another of its networks.

There were many juicy side stories to the Reagans controversy, and most got plenty of attention, like the fact that the series' star, James Brolin, is married to Barbara Streisand, who is like Lex Luthor to conservatives. But few outlets dwelled on the coincidence of the Reagans controversy bubbling over just as CBS aired the 37th Annual Country Music Association Awards, an absolute festival of dyed-in-the-wool American conservatism. One of the big winners this year was Toby Keith, whose latest tour is called the Shockin' Y'All Tour, and who had a recent hit with 'The Taliban Song,' which gleefully makes fun of the losers in the 2001 war in Afghanistan.

No controversy about the ACMA Awards; they were 'a strong performer for CBS on Wednesday,' according to the next day's Variety, 'ruling the night in all key measures and delivering its largest overall audience in six years.'

Diddy Diddly Did It

P. Diddy always looks very serious, especially for somebody named P. Diddy; this held true in the photo of him accompanying a New York Times article the day after the New York City marathon. Diddy completed the race after a month-long campaign to raise money for kids' charities, called 'Diddy Runs the City.'

The Times writer Brandon Lilly collected reactions to the rap star's participation, like fellow runners wearing signs that said 'Where is P. Diddy?' and 'I Want to Beat P. Diddy,' and that 'many runners were crossing over the divider along Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn simply to run alongside him.' The incredibly impressive Diddy Runs the City Web site had no post-race figures available, but news reports afterwards said he made close to two million dollars.

An Associated Press science reporter named Anick Jesdanun also ran the race, testing out a satellite-assisted tracking system. Jesdanun felt it necessary to note, however, that 'I crossed the marathon starting line with two main goals: to beat P. Diddy and to break four hours.'

Both those dreams came true.

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