Amid rumors of ticket giveaways, was Sharon’s Mega Tour ill-conceived?

Sharon Cuneta and her daughter Frankie.
(Photo by Richard Chen)

Is Sharon Cuneta’s Mega Tour 2005 ill timed and ill advised?

Negative feedback about Sharon’s tour have reached Manila. “3 beses pumiyok si Sharon sa kanyang show sa Las Vegas?” screamed one tabloid column headline in question mark, obviously trying to soften the negative impact of the story.

The report further said that in the Chicago leg of Sharon’s show, ticket sales was slow the producer ended up giving them away on show day in order to fill up empty seats.

Those are only two of several putdowns we heard much earlier regarding Sharon’s show, items that we deemed speculative hence it didn’t find their way in this space. However, now that they’re out in the open in Manila, we might as well share this with readers, with all due respect to Sharon who’s one of the nicest celebrities in show business.

We have no proof about the 3 piyok episodes in Las Vegas but, in Chicago, to where we went during Memorial Day weekend, we met some concert producers who verified the last minute ticket giveaways in the mega show.

One producer who shall remain nameless said that the show itself left something to be desired and said that the audience felt kadiri (that’s the adjective used) when Sharon and her husband, Sen. Francis Pangilinan, engaged in some lambingan on stage.

Another said that Sharon spent too much time talking on stage about sorry conditions back home, a man in the audience hollered “baka naman magka-iyakan pa tayo dito!”

The Chicago producers also wondered if Sharon knowingly embarked on this tour despite the fact that her New York and Los Angeles stops would run smack with the Return of the Champions tour in those cities? (Not to mention the fact that in Chicago, there was only a week’s interval between her show and that of the champions.)

Our guess is that Sharon did not realize this malicious overlapping, otherwise, knowing her good nature, she would have not thought of it. That she was only ill advised and wrongly informed by those motivated by greed and mischief and that when everything dawned on the megastar, it was too late to correct things.

At her Shrine Auditorium show in L.A. June 11, the same day the Champions played at the city’s Olympic Theater, Sharon was reported to have cried, openly wondering why the producers of the Champions show shared her playdate. Obviously, the megastar was clueless that the Champions show had long been in place, as early as November 2004 in fact, months before her producers knowingly positioned the Mega Tour 2005 to clash with the Champions show.

There were also unsubstantiated reports of a not so huge audience in the show and of how a week before show date, Mega Tour 2005 tickets were openly distributed free to fill up Shrine seats.

One story said that a big Filipino company in L.A. was given a stack of tickets for its employees but was rejected by the the intended recipients. “Ayaw namin,” the employees supposedly said, “mas gusto namin yung kabila,” referring to the Champions show.

The narrator of this anecdote was a relative of one of the employees who, by the way, preferred watching Sharon’s show because she was unfamiliar with the Champions.

No bad incidents were reported in the Florida and Atlantic City stops of the Mega show but, according to reports, audiences there wondered why Sharon embarked on this tour at a time when she’s not at her most glamorous (read: mataba) and seemingly her heart not in it.