REVIEW: Wendy Williams Shows Her Legs and Her Insecurity at Borgata

My friend put it best: “What exactly are people paying Wendy Williams to do?”

To be frank, that’s a good question: Ms. Williams took to The Borgata’s Music Box on Saturday night to premiere her sort of stand-up comedy act, although she made it quite clear it was not a stand-up show. In fact, she spent most of the evening physically sitting in a white chair, center stage, and drinking champagne while she presented a slideshow and did what she does best: talk. And talk she did, about sex, her family, and her numerous plastic surgeries. Oh, and she alluded a bit to her recent brawl with NeNe Leakes, but didn’t discuss the details, much to a disappointed audience.

In short, it was like a live recording of her pretty popular daytime talk show, but clearly unfiltered and x-rated and slightly more manic … and she was wearing a very short pair of shorts and jiggled her breasts on occasion.

“Where are the lesbians in the audience?” Ms. Williams asked at one point. “I think lesbians are some of the most resilient people I know. Trying to take care of just one vagina is like a part-time job, and they have to take care of two. If I were a lesbian, I’d be a bottom, because I’d just want to lay there. I don’t have time to be bothered with all that minutia.”

Wendy Williams performing at The Borgata on Saturday evening.

That was the tone of the entire evening: Simply unfiltered, almost unplanned, and, at times, you had to feel bad for her. But that might be what Ms. Williams, 50, was going for here: There was an overwhelming theme that she was emotionally abused by her parents when she was younger, and, to use her words, that she was “fat shamed.” That lead her to saving her pennies as a young woman to get plastic surgery: a breast augmentation and liposuction…so now she’s fabulous and famous and her haters can, to use her words, “suck it.”

What’s a shame is that when Ms. Williams told some of these more endearing stories, you could sense she had a real star quality that quickly got swept away by a lot of her silliness and a need to impress. There were several times where she would stop and say that she felt like the audience wasn’t following along with her, or that they weren’t appreciating her. If anything, those moments solidified the fact that she really does suffer from a deep-rooted sense of insecurity, despite the sold-out house in Atlantic City. (At one point, after someone in the audience shouted how good she looked, her response was, “Are you kidding? I look like a goddamned capital letter ‘P.'”)

“I don’t know if this is what you expected, but this is all I got,” Ms. Williams said about half way through her show. Considering that most of the audience didn’t know what to expect from the evening, I’d say they were pretty pleased with what they got. However, I couldn’t help but wonder how much better the night would have been if Ms. Williams teamed up with a writer or director to really flesh out a more solid outline to her performance. No doubt, if she gave her sit-down stand-up act some shape, we’d all react by saying, “How you doin’?”

An interview our sister blog G Philly did with Wendy last year: