Shock-rocker Marilyn Manson [ tickets ] goes from Ozzfest to the land of Oz, but returns to North America in October for a fall road trip that backs this year's "The Golden Age of Grotesque."

Following Thursday's (8/28) conclusion of the Ozzfest outing, Manson takes a short break before heading to Australia for a batch of mid-September dates, followed by a swing through Japan. The North American run kicks off in Los Angeles in mid-October, and is so far scheduled to hit theater-sized venues through the end of that month.

Manson will also give a Nov. 1 performance at the New Orleans Voodoo Music Experience festival before crossing the pond for a European run that fills up much of his remaining 2003 schedule.

Known for his onstage theatrics, Manson has modeled the theme of his current production after vaudevillian-era cabaret shows, and has dubbed his version of the art form "grotesque burlesque." He spoke about the concept in a recent interview with the St. Petersburg Times.

"It [goes] back to cabaret, vaudeville, the Grand Guignol, the idea of taking what doesn't exist in the real world and creating it," he told the newspaper. "That's what grotesque means to me. ... It's all of the things that I've found were escapes for people when they were living in times of fear. Times of political upheaval. Times of war. ... I drew a lot of parallels to the late '20s in Berlin, when artists were being treated as degenerates while the government was doing things that were much more degenerate in everyone else's opinion. I saw a lot of parallels, obviously, to how America is right now."

"The Golden Age of Grotesque," which features current single "This Is the New Sh--," surfaced in May, and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart. The album has since stalled out in the lower realms of that chart with a sales total that hovers around 120,000 copies, according to industry sources.