It's Waits' treatment of Georg Buchner's 1837 socio-political play, Woyzek, which premiered in 2000 in Copenhagen. It's a dark morality play performed in a style where a barker from a medicine show is mysteriously transported to the Weimar Republic via tin pan alley. Disturbing and delirious when it's not romantic and hilarious, the songs have a much more direct emotional appeal than the surrealistic Alice.