Bonnie Langford

Bonnie Langford

Bonnie Langford will be 42 in July but it's not wrong to think of the ringletted 5'1" entertainer as already very much a survivor, a show biz veteran who has been in the public spotlight since she was six. An alumna of seven West End musicals, Langford is a song-and-dance trouper of the sort they seemingly don't make anymore—seasoned, savvy, articulate about the vagaries of a career that has won her praise and, sometimes, pans. ("It's Bonnie Langford's misfortune to be regarded as a national joke," wrote The Daily Telegraph's Charles Spencer on the occasion of the star's 1998 London appearance in Sweet Charity—a performance that went on to leave Spencer reaching for superlatives.) Langford burst precociously on to the London stage, age six, as the pint-sized Bonnie Butler in the now-legendary West End musical version of Gone With the Wind and stayed with the profession to appear, in no particular order, in Cats, Me and My Girl, The Pirates of Penzance and, famously, the Angela Lansbury Gypsy, in which Langford also appeared as Baby June on Broadway at the ripe young age of nine. She's now back on the London boards as that ultimate survivor—Roxie Hart—in the long-running Chicago, playing out the show's final week at the Adelphi Theatre and opening its West End transfer to the Cambridge, where Langford is contracted until June 17. I spoke to Langford one recent lunchtime during a break in Chicago rehearsals; she was munching a tuna and cheese sandwich ("not very exciting") but managed to sound both excited and eloquent about a CV that has encompassed TV's Dr. Who, the popular ITV entertainment Dancing On Ice, and, of course, an abundance of Bob Fosse shows. Which seemed to be as good a place as any to begin.

The surprise isn't that you're playing Roxie but that it's taken so long, don't you think?
The timing is perfect for me. I am a great believer in fate and that things, both good or bad, happen at certain times in your life, though it's often easier to work out the good ones than the bad. I'm delighted to be part of the show now, particularly because of the relaunch. I'm benefitting from the fact that I will be the first Roxie that will have the Cambridge Theatre written on it. The show was put into the Adelphi Theatre to stay; it wasn't put in to move, [so] it's being properly reconsidered. It wasn't built as a touring set, which means there's that buzz of people around.

And you also get a week at the Adelphi.
[Laughs.]. Yes. I don't think I've ever closed a show quite so quickly. That's great, really, because for me it gets that terrifying situation out of the way. The thing is, we need to get a few shows under our belt before we start at the Cambridge, so that when we move, I will feel more on a level with everyone else. We've got Amra-Faye Wright back in as Velma, Brenda Edwards, who was a semi-finalist on The X Factor [on ITV1] as Mama Morton, and Luca Barbereschi, who's done the show in Italy in Italian, with us as Billy Flynn.

What's it been like to work with him?
Luca's finding it very tricky, but he is amazing; I don't know how he's doing it. He's very funny—so gorgeous. We had a fire alarm the other day and he says to us, “It is my heart; it is burning.” Can you imagine if anyone said that in England? We'd all go, ‘C'mon.'”

Does Roxie feel like a marriage waiting to happen?
I'd like to think so. I'm blessed Bob Fosse has been a part of my life, that I'm passing through that genre again after Sweet Charity and Fosse on tour. I've always worked as a dancer and actor combined, and you can't take away that physicality, and the thing with Fosse is that his work comes from that school of thought: you don't just walk around for the sake of moving about. His female characters are very rich to explore, so it's always exciting to be back in that fold.

Did you ever know him?
Alas no. The Sweet Charity revival was the first of his shows that I did, by which point he had died. But it was great to be part of that. I met and worked a little with Gwen Verdon in New York on it and just felt some kind of connection there, which comes back every time I get to see the work. It's like people who do

Bonnie Langford

Fosse's work have a shared language, and it instantly clicks with me, always; you never get bored in a Fosse show, ever.

Why is that?
Because if you feel comfortable, you ain't doing it right. It should feel like it's coming from within you, which brings with it a certain amount of pain, whether physical or emotional, and vulnerability. You don't get that in most musicals.

How does Roxie compare to Charity?
Oh, Charity's a sweetheart; she's slightly more of a victim in a way. The reason Chicago works more in this day and age is there are more bad girls in the world than there used to be. This show has always been ahead of its time, and we're much more accepting of shows like this in these times. I've been working this morning on the monologue just before the song “Roxie,” which gets to the core of the whole character. Once you can understand why somebody responds in a certain way, you can empathise if not sympathise with her. She's a bad girl, but there must be layers there: in the first scene, she shoots a guy—bang!—but it's because he's walking out on her, and the suggestion is that everyone is walking out on her; everyone's left her. That's true of Charity but Roxie takes it one step further. As the lyric says, hers is “one big world full of ‘no.’”

Had you seen the show before?
I came to the opening night here with Ute [Lemper] and Ruthie [Henshall], and I did see the original production all those years ago at the Cambridge, with Jenny Logan and Antonia Ellis. But times were different then, and I do think we live in a faster world now that's more appropriate for this show. But the best a few years ago was seeing Chita Rivera do Roxie. Oh my God, she was incredible. You were just salivating, wanting more. I thought, “I just want to be in the presence of this woman.” I didn't want to blink in case I might miss something magical and charismatic and laid bare.

But the marketing is great, too.
That's another thing—the branding. Say the word Chicago, and everyone knows what you're talking about—all those gorgeous images in the ads, full of sensation. It's what the musical says about longevity, too. Nowadays, you have people who say, I just want to be rich and famous, but they don't want the path to get there. They want the lifestyle, or what they think is the lifestyle, without the slog that goes with it.