Beginning an evening of amiable waffling, Whoopi Goldberg announces that she isn’t about to discuss all the terrible things happening in the world. From an audience not too shy to heckle (albeit mostly with variations on “We love you!”) comes an unsolicited plea to engage with one such inflammatory topic: the current US president. Goldberg doesn’t flinch. “It’s worse than that,” she says. “I’m turning 70.”
So begins an undemanding set which often plays like a Grumpy Old Women spin-off and echoes the title of Goldberg’s 2010 book Is It Just Me? Or Is It Nuts Out There? The Egot-winning actor, host of The View and great-grandmother dispenses semi-formed thoughts on everything from ageing and AI (“Fuck Alexa”) to misbehaving children (she once threatened to eat one). She is sharp on the discomfort of being attracted to “some kid” of 60, her worry being that she will be branded not a cradle-snatcher but a grave-robber. Other moments, such as a warning about how to opt out of sharing personal information via mobile phones, are like reading a boomer relative’s Facebook page.
The show’s structure, if that’s not too grand a word for what is essentially a fans’ meet-and-greet complete with mementoes passed to the stage and audience members’ tattoos inspected, is as baggy as Goldberg’s multi-coloured sweatshirt. Sauntering back and forth, she offers vignettes from her recent memoir Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me. In delineating her late brother’s numerous ex-girlfriends who came out of the woodwork at his wake, she lends a glimpse of her youthful comic acuity for those of us who didn’t see the 1984 Mike Nichols-directed Broadway monologues which made her reputation. When she loses her train of thought (“Where was I?”), the crowd gladly step in en masse (“Italy!”).
After the interval, Graham Norton spends 45 minutes prodding Goldberg through her career highlights and trying, not always successfully, to steer her away from unpromising anecdotes. She ticks off The Color Purple (on which she offered to play “dirt on the floor”), Ghost (no one wanted her to audition) and Sister Act, on which she exclaimed to her most esteemed co-star: “You’re Maggie Smith! What are you doing in this fucking movie?” There are even appreciative cheers for Theodore Rex, in which she was paired with a talking dinosaur to fight crime – a film so abysmal that she tried to extricate herself at the 11th hour.
From her declaration of love for – and yearning to play the lead in – Doctor Who to her recollections of how she performed her character Blee T (a Black ET) for Steven Spielberg, there is not a tried-and-tested anecdote here that fans don’t know verbatim.
It seems occasionally as if her crowd work might pep things up. “Are you going to the bathroom, girl?” she asks after spotting someone plodding up the aisle, then promises to wait before continuing the rest of the show. In fact, the departing figure turns out to be a man with dreads. Realising her error, Goldberg says: “I need better glasses.” Better material, too.
• At Cardiff Arena on 5 September
