He’s been Hollywood’s greatest train wreck for the past two months and the meme that America initially embraced with open arms, but Charlie Sheen’s explosion into the realm of the ridiculous has been slowing down to a crawl as of late. His traveling road show, so mysteriously cloaked in anti-press garb since its much-maligned beginnings in Detroit on April 2, has gotten mixed reviews to say the least, with the boos that rained down in the Motor City and the Big Apple negated to an extent by a lukewarm and cautiously positive reaction in Chicago. So it was with slight trepidation and an overwhelming curiosity that 6,000 onlookers piled into Boston University’s Agganis Arena Tuesday night to see just what Sheen’s Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat Is Not An Option tour would have in store.
A lot of the pre-show speculation revolved around what, exactly, this tour was comprised of. An actor from such big-money dramas as “Wall Street” and “Platoon” who recently turned his hand toward the much-publicized $2 million-per episode life of a sitcom star in “2 And A Half Men,” Sheen has never been a comedian, doesn’t play any music to speak of and didn’t have a stage show to present. So what, then, were audiences paying between $60 and $100 dollars to see?
If you’ve followed his antics over the past few months, what Sheen ended coming up with wouldn’t have come as much of a surprise. Opening with an explosive video montage made up of just about every death or war scene from a major motion picture in the last thirty years, Sheen emerged to a rock star reception, walking in through the crowd as his legions of “fans” rose to their feet.
And legions they were. Despite questions about whether or not the place would be full even in light of Sheen’s claim of a sellout, Agganis was, if not to capacity, at least most of the way there (though some people outside the arena afterward claimed to have purchased their tickets for less than half of their original value on ticket reselling web sites).
From there, the show got off to a disjointed start, with a feeling of disorganization that never really dissipated throughout the hour and fifteen minutes of Sheen madness. The stage was bare but for two chairs, lending itself to an almost Oprah-like atmosphere, with the interviewer-in-chief being played by former MTV VJ Simon Rex.
His inane questions, starting with “How did this all happen?” were mainly vehicles for Sheen’s half-crazed ranting (Sheen’s response blamed the whole event on “seven-gram crack rocks”), while a quick transition to audience question and answer sessions gave rise to Sheen’s advice on how to score drugs in an unfamiliar city (“Ask the concierge which parts of the city to stay out of”) and a rehearsed audience competition to see which of the skimpily dressed women he pulled from the front few rows could qualify as “Goddess number three.”
There was a run through a few celebrity guests – notably (or eye-rollingly) “Jersey Shore’s” Pauly D – and a video parody of his 20/20 interview with Andrea Canning which caused some people to head to the exits, before a return to the tried and tested formula of audience Q and A, again dominated by questions about crack and prostitutes. A Snoop Dogg video ended the show as the crowd poured toward the streets without bothering to watch.
It was an odd event, not quite the career suicide that most expected, yet it couldn’t really be qualified as a total success, either. There were moments that were humorous – as when Sheen went on a rant about canceling NASA and channeling the money toward “people who actually live here” – while other parts were almost sad, like watching someone flame out amidst an encroaching cage of denial. “You won’t wind up in a 12-step program on a drug called Charlie Sheen” was an alarming statement, while his insistence that if he has “any amount of fun,” referring to drinking or doing drugs, then a mythical “they” will take his children away and give them to their “crack whore” mother. The sad part was that Sheen seemed to be the only one missing the irony.
It’s interesting to note that his mantras – “winning,” “defeat is not an option,” “can’t is the cancer of happen” – are overwhelmingly positive in nature and are the backbone of a positive outlook on life. The issue is that Sheen appears uniquely adept at fitting this positivity into his whirlwind I-do-what-I-want attitude and coming out covered in white powder. He wasn’t showered in boos Tuesday night but he might still want to re-evaluate just what this whole thing is all about, anyway. America would certainly like to know, and quickly.
Dan Rys attended the event on behalf of www.treatment-centers.net and reviewed it for the Daily Free Press.
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