Somers to take over cabaret — and part of the menu — at Westgate Las Vegas

Ownership has its privileges.

David Siegel, the Westgate Resorts chairman who has been putting a personal touch on the relaunch of his Westgate Las Vegas, told Suzanne Somers on Wednesday, “It was worth every penny I paid for this property just to be able to hug you today.”

It also gives him the ability to offer Somers the Shimmer Cabaret and rename it Suzanne’s, and to let her open a spa and an organic cafe on the pool deck as well.

Somers and Siegel on Wednesday announced the variety star and lifestyle advocate will perform “Suzanne Sizzles” for 28 weeks starting May 23. It will not displace the venue’s two later-evening productions, “Purple Reign” and “Sexxy.”

“A part of me was not being used,” said the 68-year-old, who has been known less as an entertainer and more as a fitness guru in recent years. She is currently competing on ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars,” where she ranked in the bottom two this week.

Somers used her popularity on the sitcom “Three’s Company” to perform in Las Vegas in the 1980s, including a stint as headliner of the “Moulin Rouge” revue in the same hotel, when it was known as the Las Vegas Hilton. In more recent years, she played The Orleans in 2006.

At the news conference to announce the partnership, Somers said that when she went in to pitch her ideas, Siegel interrupted after a few minutes and said, “The deal’s done. What do you want?”

“He said to me also, ‘You are my favorite actress.’ So then I knew he loved Chrissy Snow,” she said of her “Three’s Company” character.

“I wanted to come back just like this,” she added. “I wanted this room,” she said of singing in the cabaret venue instead of the larger theater (which will soon host a series of Elvis Presley-themed productions). “I wanted to bring back the kind of shows that I used to love to go to.”

The Las Vegas headliners who were still working in the ’80s “didn’t need to fly and flip with a lot of effects,” she said. “You just wanted them, because there was something about them that drew you to them.

“ ‘I think I can put your hotel on the map,’ ” she said she told Siegel and other Westgate executives.

But Somers was not without a few requests regarding her “toxic-free life.” Westgate is “completely redoing my suite upstairs, putting in bamboo floors, toxic-free paint” and organic furniture.

Read more from Mike Weatherford at bestoflasvegas.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com.