Troubled US actor Charlie Sheen was booed off stage on Saturday in a chaotic start to a live show mini-tour, a month after being fired from his megahit TV show.
Fans started walking out within 20 minutes of the start of the Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is not an Option debut show in Detroit, which ended after barely an hour when Sheen failed to return following a musical break.
“It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” said Jennifer Pyryt, 26, as fans streamed out of the Fox theater, many of them booing and doing thumbs-down signs. “The show was horrible.”
Photo: AFP
The show to a packed 5,000-strong audience started well with a spoof involving news clips of the actor’s recent outbursts and high-action excerpts from classic movies including Apocalpse Now, starring his father Martin.
Sheen’s two nubile “goddesses,” with whom he lives, also won applause for kissing each other passionately.
RAMBLING MAN
However, the boos began during a stream-of-consciousness monologue by Sheen at a presidential podium — the kind of verbal fireworks he has displayed online, but which patently failed to grip Saturday’s audience.
“I don’t think it was put together very well,” added Mary, 41, saying things were not helped when the unpredictable Sheen tried to make a joke about Detroit’s reputation.
“If he had not mentioned -Detroit as a crack town, or the stealing of cars ... he turned a lot of people off,” she said.
After commenting several times on the fact that he was being booed, and getting increasingly tetchy as the stream of people walking out grew, Sheen said he would take a break while a new Snoop Dogg video was played.
When the video finished, the lights came up, and it was clear that Sheen was not coming back on stage.
Sheen was fired last month from the hit TV series Two and a Half Men after criticizing its producers in a series of rambling media outbursts that Warner Brothers called the actor’s “dangerously self-destructive conduct.”
The 45-year-old then became an Internet sensation after launching a Twitter feed that now has 3.4 million followers and an online Web-streamed show, Sheen’s Korner.
At the same time he announced his plans for the live tour, which now has more than 20 scheduled dates over the next month, after tickets for the first gigs sold out within 18 minutes.
Many wore “Warlock” T-shirts and shouted his “Winning” mantra for TV cameras gathered outside the theater.
DISAPPOINTMENT
“I think we’re gonna have a good time. We’re going to be entertained. We’re gonna laugh, we’re gonna scream, we’re gonna holler. Charlie Sheen’s a class entertainer,” Bill Bagwell, 53, said.
However, the mood after the show was a mixture of disappointment and anger, with some fans talking about asking for their money back.
“Charlie’s a big fraud. It was unbelievable, it was the worst show I’ve seen in my life,” another man said, declining to give his name, as he and others headed off into the night.
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