ANOTHER MAKE-OVER?

Madonna the dance diva. Madonna the sex goddess. Madonna the musical actress. Madonna the heavy-metal queen?

The ever-evolving artist has just signed on with a management team best known for its success in the heavy-metal field with such mega-rockers as Metallica and Def Leppard, though it’s also recently been working with Courtney Love and other alternative-rock acts.

Having suddenly split with longtime manager Freddy DeMann, who remains her partner in the Maverick records company, Madonna has finalized a deal with Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch, who head the New York-based Q Prime firm. The pair will oversee marketing strategies for Madonna’s new album, expected in stores in March, as well as a possible world tour that would include the singer’s first U.S. shows since 1990.

Burnstein and Mensch will work with Madonna’s longtime associate Caresse Norman, though the latter’s duties will be more on the film side of the singer-actress’ career, while Q Prime will be involved only with the music.

Despite the new arrangement, it’s not metal that Madonna is moving toward. So why go with people best known for that field?

“She met with a couple of different managers,” says Liz Rosenberg, Madonna’s spokeswoman. (Madonna declined to be interviewed.) “She just made a connection with Cliff and Peter, and felt they were very, very smart. There was just a rapport that developed right away, and she liked their ideas about marketing.”

Burnstein is amused that some might think it an odd fit.

“How do they know she hasn’t cut a metal album?” he jokes. “When we had success in the ‘80s with metal, we attracted other metal acts. So it’s hard to go after other kinds of artists when you get stereotyped--hard to tell them you know about other kinds of music.

“But people don’t know what we’re really about and at the end of the day maybe they don’t know what management is about. It’s about potential, and it doesn’t matter what genre they are. We’re really good at working with artists who make great albums and then taking them as far as they can be taken. We’ve had a few who had albums do more than 10 million in sales.”

Rosenberg says that Madonna was steered toward Q Prime by Guy Oseary, the 25-year-old Maverick executive who signed the label’s two top acts, Alanis Morissette and Prodigy.

She also signed with the new managers with the blessing of Love, who has become a friend and whose image-changes and moves for Hollywood acceptance seem modeled in many ways on Madonna’s blueprint.

Madonna’s music has now taken a turn into electronic dance music, Rosenberg says. The new collection was co-produced by the singer with British techno veteran William Orbit.

It’s a shift from her recent work--the “Evita” movie soundtrack as well as 1994’s “Bedtime Stories” and her 1996 ballad compilation, “Something to Remember”--which had skewed toward an adult-pop market. It wasn’t her most commercially successful move, with sales of “Bedtime Stories” and “Something to Remember” at 2.2 million and 1.7 million, respectively, far short of her 9 million peak with 1984’s “Like a Virgin” album.

The upcoming album, though, looks ahead to new horizons and returns her to her roots in the dance club world, where she had her first successes in the mid ‘80s with such hits as “Lucky Star.”

“It’s an enormous leap into different sounds and electronics,” Rosenberg says. “And simultaneously it’s in some ways like vintage Madonna while being completely different from anything she’s done, sometimes both things in the same song.”

The most intriguing element of the plans is the possible tour, which would be her first U.S. shows since the elaborate “Blonde Ambition” trek of 1990--the one with the pointy bras and dancers in nuns’ habits.

“It’s certainly in the realm of possibilities,” Rosenberg says. “But it depends on a lot of other elements in her movie career. ‘Chicago’ [the film of the Tony-winning musical in which Madonna is expected to co-star with Goldie Hawn] seems like it’s further in the distance, more likely later than sooner. Unless another film project surfaces, Madonna is prepared to go on the road.”

Rosenberg did not confirm reports that motherhood has led Madonna to say that she won’t repeat the sex-oriented elements of past tours, but she did say that any tour would reflect the “new” Madonna.

“Tours are never what they were the time before in the Madonna world, and I imagine this one would be quite different,” she says. “She almost wishes she could just perform the new album. And she’s said that if she has to do ‘Like a Virgin’ one more time, she’ll kill herself--though she’s said that before and done it anyway, but reinvented it every time.”