Robert Cohen The Theatre

For his third album, Nighthawks at the Diner, Tom Waits set up a nightclub in the studio, invited an audience, and cut a 70-minute, two-LP set of new songs. It's an appropriate format for compositions that deal even more graphically and, for the first time, humorously with Waits' late-night world of bars and diners…

If Closing Time, Tom Waits' debut album, consisted of love songs set in a late-night world of bars and neon signs, its follow-up, The Heart of Saturday Night, largely dispenses with the romance in favor of poetic depictions of the same setting. On "Diamonds on My Windshield" and "The Ghosts of Saturday Night," Waits doesn't even sing, instead reciting his verse rhythmically against bass and drums like a Beat hipster. Musically, the album contains the same mixture of folk, blues, and jazz as its predecessor, with producer Bones Howe occasionally bringing in an orchestra to underscore the loping melodies…

He was born in Cologne, but it was in Paris that Jacques Offenbach achieved fame. A special feature of this 30-CD collection are star-studded recordings in both French and German of his most celebrated operettas – works that overflow with joie de vivre and satirical wit – and of Les Contes d’Hoffmann, an opera that daringly fuses fantasy, comedy and tragedy. It also includes irresistibly stylish performances of such tempting rarities as Les Brigands, Pomme d’Api, Monsieur Choufleuri and Mesdames de la Halle.

In the 1970s, Tom Waits combined a lyrical focus on desperate, low-life characters with a persona that seemed to embody the same lifestyle, which he sang about in a raspy, gravelly voice. From the '80s on, his work became increasingly theatrical as he moved into acting and composing…

Heartattack and Vine, Tom Waits' first album in two years and his last of seven for Asylum Records, is a transitional album, with tracks like the rhythm-heavy title song and "'Til the Money Runs Out" foreshadowing the sonic experiments of the Island albums, while piano-with-orchestra tracks like "Saving All My Love for You" and "On the Nickel" (written as a motion-picture title tune) hark back to Waits' Randy Newman-influenced early days…