TCB

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PEEPING TOM

Broken Clock Cabaret's wildly successful Inside a Broken Clock: A Tom Waits Peepshow takes a third trip through the barfly bard's booze-soaked repertoire this weekend, a warm-up for the 16-member company's Bay area trip later this month. Producer Rick McNulty promises even more sleaze this time around. "This year we've added a guy in drag, another burlesque number, and we've made the puppets bigger," he says. Overseeing the peep show, a hodgepodge of dance, comedy, vaudeville, and puppetry set to the No Salvation Army Band, is a full-time gig for McNulty, who originally envisioned a "creepy kids' show" with partner/peep-show choreographer Ellen Stader on a hazy road trip to the Rio Grande Valley. Inevitably, such intimate association with Waits' material has led to a revelation or two. "He's gone a long way from his bad-liver-and-broken-heart period," McNulty says. "He's much deeper, for lack of a better word, and darker." However, he hastens to add, the idea is to entertain the audience, not depress them. "We could just as easily do a sad, somber sort of production, but who wants to see that?" he says. "We focus more on the carny aspects of his songs, try to reach in and strangle all the black humor out of it we can." Showtimes are 8 & 10:30pm tonight (Thursday) and Friday at the Parish. A limited number of $15 tickets will be available at the door.