Underneath all the layers of synthetic beading, there was some serious talent on show, and the high kicking Rockettes’ collective prowess is impressive. An expertly choreographed section where the ladies took on the roles of toy soldiers helped to showcase some of that skill, and revisiting the group’s wardrobe highlights of the past few decades was a nice touch. It is the show’s 85th year, after all, and there is something to be said for their pulling power and ability to still create a buzz almost a century after their debut.

There is also, however, something to be said for not getting too carried away, and it seemed a little like director, choreographer and conceptualist Linda Haberman had forgotten this during the final scene. In a freakish concluding parade, where a donkey, the Rockettes, children, live sheep, little people (err elves) and two live camels lined the stage, it was hard to decide what to be most offended by. The show did bring a lot of (premature) Christmas cheer to New York, and that almost made us feel warm and fuzzy inside. But one last look at those poor withered camels onstage, and the fake blizzard ensuing outside the venue on our departure, and those near fuzzy feelings all but vanished into the faux snowy ether.

Jack White playing in Australia earlier this summer. (Photo: Getty)

Jack White is playing a pair of shows at Radio City Music Hall this weekend and last night's sold out concert was short on songs and long on drama. The former White Stripes frontman abruptly left the stage after an hour prompting a crowd of irate fans to take to the streets. 

The Observer was in attendance for pleasure rather than business, but once things got weird, we got to work. But, despite our best efforts, we're still not entirely sure what happened.

Mr. White's show began with a rollicking set featuring songs from his recent solo album, Blunderbuss, and tracks from his bands: The White Stripes, The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather. From our seat in the nosebleeds, it seemed as though Mr. White's music was enthusiastically received by the crowd. However, after about 45 minutes, Mr. White suddenly left the stage.

RELATED:  Elephant in the Room: White Stripes Hit New York

Thinking this was the standard concert tease that often occurs prior to an encore, the vast majority of the audience remained, clapping and cheering in an effort to encourage Mr. White to retake the stage. After more than 20 minutes, all of the house lights were turned on and ushers began to make their way through the crowd informing them the show was finished.

"The show is over. We don't know why. You'll probably find out on a blog, MediaTakeOut or some other source," one said.

This early ending clearly did not sit well with the crowd.

As fans, who paid a minimum of $40 to attend the concert, filed out the venue we heard (and may have even participated in) chants of "Fuck Jack White!" and "This is Bullshit!" In the lobby, we witnessed multiple attendees angrily returning merchandise they had purchased at the show.

Outside Radio City, a group of more than 100 people began to gather outside the main backstage exit booing and demanding answers as to why the show concluded so abruptly. Security quickly erected barricades and began pushing the crowd back. In addition to banging on parked cars and the repeated shouts of "Fuck Jack White," we overheard a few more inventive bits of invective.

"Jack White kills puppies," one man yelled.

"I'm going to fuck Meg White," another person said, referring to Mr. White's former White Stripes bandmate.

"Bababooey!" someone else yelled, perhaps inevitably.

The mini-mob became more enraged when deliverymen showed up to bring multiple pizza pies back stage. As Radio City staffers and others left the exit they were barraged with questions from the crowd. Most remained silent, but one man in a Radio City t-shirt was slightly more forthcoming.

"Y'all do me a favor, when he gets out, boo his ass," he said.

In addition to the boos and shouts, rumors flew through the crowd. We spoke to multiple people who claimed Mr. White had several angry exchanges with a shirtless man in the front row. They said the man who provoked Mr. White's ire was subsequently removed by security. Others claimed Mr. White shouted something before leaving the stage. From our seats in the second to last row of the theater, we hadn't seen anything amiss. A post from BuzzFeed Music, seemingly without basis, blamed the situation on Mr. White's rage at scalpers also circulated throughout the crowd.

After about an hour, the group outside Radio City thinned to about 50 angry diehards. Along with the rumors, the situation provoked a flurry of frenzied tweets. One hashtag, #JackWhiteDebacle, which was coined by the inimitable @Blabbeando, quickly generated more than 50 postings.

Many in the crowd speculated Mr. White was displeased with the response he got from the audience.

"Jesus Christ, is this an NPR convention?" Mr. White asked at one point during the show.

However, having seen Mr. White twice before, mocking the crowd to get louder seems to be part of his regular repertoire.

Eventually, a member of the Radio City security team provided us with an answer.

"He wasn't happy with the sound," the man said when we asked if he knew why the show seemingly ended so early. "I don't know why he pulled that."

He added that Radio City staffers expected the evening to last much longer.

Since we had a seemingly credible answer and our companion was very eager to get home, we decided to head to the subway rather than remain at the venue attempting to continue deciphering the reasons for Mr. White's diva-like departure. We sent an email to his publicist asking for an explanation, but, as of this writing, we have yet to receive a response.

Their hero had weeks ago stepped into the center ring by refusing one of the grander frauds of the Late American circus--the redemption racket that TV quietly borrowed from religion sometime in the waning decades of the 20th century. But the cunning Mr. Sheen floundered the moment the morning-show interviewers left his mansion, depriving him of their precious and practiced outrage.

He seemed to mistake himself for a tiger-blooded cultural revolutionary, and his devourers for followers. His U-Stream talk show was scattered and bizarre; his Funny or Die cooking show wasn't funny at all. His Violent Torpedo of Truth tour was an opening-night disaster in Detroit, an ill-christened tabloid basket-case.

By the time Mr. Sheen washed up in Manhattan, he was all out of charm and flair, quite entirely down to freak appeal, the dark matter of Octomoms, Humanzees and casual Austrian cannibalism. But this stuff is no match for casual American cannibalism: The throng came to poke at his living corpse, to see if vodka would run from its side, if Mr. Sheen possessed any death-defying magic or was, more ideally, just an historically entertaining end-stage addict destined to self-destruct in some uniquely amusing way, ideally right before their eyes, within the next hour or so.

"Fuck Carnegie Hall!" one man yelled as Mr. Sheen walked onstage.

The modern Rome is self-sacking. The barbarian drew massive cheers and was soon on to greater hate-targets.

"Fuck Detroit!" bellowed the little Alaric next, and he was hailed mightily.

"Cocaine!" he boomed, a simian belch that evoked the whole Sheenian ideal of vice and impunity to bind all as one. Well, all except one.

"I quit cocaine," said Mr. Sheen, and so things were rocky from the start between the man and his mob.

From the upper decks, the holders of $25 tickets booed sobriety. It diminished, after all, the chances of their hero dying unnaturally and hilariously right before their eyes.

In dark sunglasses, he sat at center stage, sating the dark appetite with Wallenda tales of empty sex with a pregnant Juarez hooker whose torso was marked with Caesarian scars, of flooding hotel rooms while cracked-out in Hong Kong, of hiding their beloved cocaine in his crotch on a humid day, then finding that his ball sweat had turned it to paste.

The nameless Everymook serving as interviewer mistook the mob for an audience and himself for James Lipton. An attempt to discuss the making of Wall Street triggered the first wave of heckling: "Boring! Boring! Boring!"

"Early showbiz memories, I imagine you have some pretty interesting stories over ..."

"Boring!"

"Anything in particular that stands out over the course of your showbiz ..."

"Boring!"

Mr. Sheen appealed to the mass mind's palsied centers of identity: They'd boo his failure to contract gonorrhea before them, and he'd win them back with shared hatred of all bosses. Back and forth it went, boring and predictable and sad.

Mr. Sheen appeared to believe that his father had once actually killed a man named Kurtz in the Philippines, that he himself had suffered for the national honor and interest in distant lands under Oliver Stone: "I survived the fucking jungles of Platoon."

"People wonder where all this shit came from," he said. "I watched hot chicks for years swoon over my pop. He always had cash in his pockets, and he was always surrounded by hot chicks: 'Let's see: Hot chicks, cash in his pockets. Fuck exploring the arts. Fuck finding my craft.'"

But here he confused what people pay to see with what they are paid to listen to: Radio City wanted real sickness, not forced-catharsis. Soon the aisles moved with early-exiters.

Finally came the Trotting Out of the Goddesses, the live-in concubines so essential to the Sheen legend.

"Whattup, New York!" said the Goddess whose air of deathliness suggested shoplifting and landfills.

"New York's my favorite city, love y'all!" said the Goddess whose air of doomedness suggested casual incest and fetal alcohol syndrome.

The y'all was the thing: This was no siren, they realized, no carnal wonder at all, only a hick who'd ridden a Greyhound to Hollywood. She was lower than even the holders of the cheapest tickets, and as such, according to the night's primate code, must be devoured.

The boos grew deafening, and talk turned to death proper.

The non-Lipton asked if the crowd would like to hear Mr. Sheen's Bucket List, and to the extent that 5,000 people can impatiently say, "Fine," they did.

Mr. Sheen said he wanted to drive a cab dressed like Travis Bickle, to take people far from where they wanted to go and not care, to crash into the stock exchange, evoking antisocial darkness insofar as a multimillionaire can.

But talk of death is no substitute for death itself. And Mr. Sheen's job was not to explore his own darkest appetites but to sate the mob's.

More boredom, more booing.

Then Mr. Sheen said that before dying, he'd like to perform on a Friday night at Radio City Music Hall, which, over the past 54 minutes, in the most marginal and half-hearted sense imaginable, he'd done.

With that, the sick man took the dark people's money, and was gone.

 editorial@observer.com