No one anywhere saw this coming:
As it happened, Mr. Sheen and Detroit proved to be a disastrous match. The Fox, a lavishly ornamented, carefully restored 5,000-seat show palace evoking a lost golden age of spectacle, is beautiful, but the scene there was ugly, as a boisterous, liquored-up capacity crowd greeted Mr. Sheen with cheers that quickly turned to boos. The show -- a ragged mix of video clips, ear-splitting music, profanity-laced monologues and clumsy attempts to encourage audience participation -- did not so much end as collapse. After a little more than an hour Mr. Sheen turned the stage over to a rapper he said would "wake up" the increasingly belligerent spectators, or maybe calm them down. After a Snoop Dogg video, the house lights went up, and though the headliner briefly returned to trade insults with a mostly empty house, the evening clearly had not gone according to plan. If there ever was a plan...
There were apparently chants of "refund" during the show. I don't know. I think if you paid money to see Charlie Sheen live, you got exactly what you deserved.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a former national correspondent for The Atlantic. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, Between the World and Me, We Were Eight Years in Power, and The Water Dancer.