Charlie Sheen at Radio City Music Hall: He's not winning anymore. He's losing, big time

[TheLegacy]

So much for out-of-town tryouts. On Friday night, Charlie Sheen brought his Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is Not an Option tour to New York City, where he delivered an hour-long show to a more or less capacity crowd at Radio City Music Hall. There was no warm-up act, and the show has been shorn of bells and whistles, though the hour did include a replay of the overly long parody video of his Andrea Canning interview on 20/20, as if anyone needed to see that YouTube clip one more time. In speaking about the evening, let me not mince words: It was Detroit all over again, an aimless and slovenly disaster, with the crowd taking less than 20 minutes to turn on him. And once they did, the boos and the catcalls just kept slowly escalating. The rumors of a better, more disciplined and lively show that had emerged during the last week out of Chicago and Ohio never came close to materializing. Does Sheen wonder, at this point, what he?s doing wrong? It was obvious that he found the mounting audience hostility at Radio City a little flabbergasting. He jeered at the jeerers, and often seemed to be saying, with a grimace of attitude: Why the hell are you people heckling me if you paid to see me? He didn?t seem to get that the audience was answering back: Because we didn?t want you to suck.

One thing is now clear: Sheen?s 15 minutes are over. Kaput. I don?t mean his 15 minutes of fame, of course, or even of infamy. I mean his 15 minutes of being a Rebel. For that, let?s make no mistake, is what this whole hellapalooza has been about: the prospect that Charlie Sheen, by saying whatever damn thing floats through his tiger blood and into his bizarrely semi-lucid crackpot brain and down to his hair-trigger mouth, could sort of, perhaps, just maybe be the Last Honest Man in a paralyzingly bogus media culture.
In the early stages of his madman meltdown phase, when he played the talk shows like a seasoned provocateur, or even on his public-access-style Webcasts, he created the sex-and-dope version of a Howard Beale mad-as-hell moment. He held out the prospect of danger, of saying the things that we aren?t allowed to say. And that, let?s be honest, became ? at least to some of us ? an addictive prospect, a slumming form of performance-art entertainment for an overly controlled, rule-bound, PR-driven, terminally politically correct, spin-cycle America. Which leads one to ask: What does a Howard Beale who has already had his mad-as-hell eruption do for an encore?

Before the show, in the gilded lobby of Radio City, the surest sign that Sheen had passed from unpredictable bad-boy showman to official (yawn) rock star were the merchandise boutiques, stocked with paraphernalia that bear his patented if not yet trademarked phrases: the T-shirts emblazoned with ?Winning? or (against a photo of Charlie with his fist raised) ?F?-ing,? the wool cap that reads ?I?m Not Bipolar,? the white ?Genius? book bag, the wife-beater T-shirt that says ?Bangin? 7Gs,? the ?Goddess? hot pants. Sheen may be an addict, a screw-loose flake, a messed-up husband and father, but the message of the tour, and of those chintzy swag counters, is that he is also an industry. Which, of course, is supposed to be the way to get payback, the way to win, in our capitalist Thunderdome. ?I want the Warlock T-shirt!? the guy behind me said to his girlfriend, and many, indeed, were lining up to buy them. I kept asking people in the lobby why they?d come to see Charlie, and more or less everyone told me variations on the same thing: that they respond to Sheen because he barks out the truth as he sees it. That?s hot currency in a climate where even a comic artist as outré as Howard Stern ? who once occupied that deathless truth-teller role ? sounds more and more, beneath his bluster, like a happy and quasi-defanged pussycat.

The show kept to a mini version of rock-star time, starting exactly half an hour late, and Sheen dispensed with any fripperies. From the get-go, it was just Charlie, out on stage in a matching black New York Yankees cap and T-shirt, sitting down in a plush armchair to be interviewed by his softball patsy/straight man. From the get-go, the trouble with this format, at least when you?ve got a personality as hostile and acerbic as Sheen?s, is that it basically sets up the audience to hear a series of zingers. In essence, they?re expecting ?sit-down comedy.? And Sheen doesn?t have any jokes! He just has grudges that make him sound like a bad Vegas insult comic (think Andy Kaufman?s Tony Clifton, with less charm). His dribbled-out, half-baked ramblings try to be funny, but mostly they?re like setups without the punchlines. And that has a weirdly enervating effect. Every time he coughs out another observation that?s greeted by murmury silence, punctuated by the occasional ?Bor-ing!,? a little more air gets sucked out of the room. And pretty soon everyone there is starting to suffocate.

I can testify that if he had actually tried to say something thoughtful or confessional or interesting, even if it had been deadly serious, the crowd would have been with him. Instead, taking ?edgy? puffs on a cigarette like the Denis Leary of 1988, he tells ?stories,? a lot of which are reruns, and almost all of which sound like vague and hazy barstool anecdotes. Which is why the first trickles of heckling, I?m not kidding, commenced within the opening five minutes. People are used to entertainers, even mediocre ones, establishing a rhythm, an authority, and Sheen, in his act, doesn?t deliver that basic, organizing energy. He?s essentially reactive, which is why he?s so effective on talk shows, or even during those hostile news-media interrogations. He requires an antagonist to heat up his tiger blood. Here, to me, is why the show was like a car accident unfolding in slow motion:

http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/04/09/ch...losing/?hpt=T2

[nation-x]

more or less capacity crowd

Sounds like a win to me... I could give a fuck less if they liked the show... they bought tickets... >> WIN

[TheLegacy]

Originally Posted by nation-x

Sounds like a win to me... I could give a fuck less if they liked the show... they bought tickets... >> WIN

They bought the hype - can't wait until he is out of the media spotlight

[Rochard]

Duh, Winning.

He can retire with the money he's already made, still party like a rock star, and eventually he'll land another tv show or movie.

Charlie Sheen never looses.