She arrives on stage wearing butterfly wings, thrusts her crotch to the stab of a trumpet then jumps into splits to raucous applause. Bonnie Langford is 59, but she still has the energy and high kicks she had when she was dancing all over TV screens and West End stages in the 1980s.
The sexy butterfly number is You Gotta Get a Gimmick from Gypsy, as seen in Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends, a tribute to the late composer staged last May (and on iPlayer). Langford is rehearsing for a new 16-week run of the show, alongside Broadway stars Bernadette Peters, Lea Salonga and a host of new cast members, directed by Matthew Bourne.
We meet before she goes into the studio and she’s in candy colours and floral shorts, with bouncy hair and bright eyes. She is chatty, thoughtful, open and professional – she’s been doing interviews since she won TV talent show Opportunity Knocks in 1971, aged six. Her introduction to Sondheim and to Gypsy came at eight, when she played Baby June alongside Angela Lansbury both in London and on Broadway.
Fifty years on, Langford has been riding high in recent musicals (Anything Goes, 42nd Street) and on TV. She did a stint on EastEnders as Carmel Kazemi and has just filmed the new series of Doctor Who, reprising her role as companion Melanie Bush from the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy eras (with less helpless screaming this time, she promises). She’s a child star who made good, and has survived in the business where others didn’t.
We’ll come to all that, but first: Sondheim. When Old Friends premiered the stage was fit to burst with top-tier stars wanting to pay tribute, and the show was even simulcast to another theatre with a second audience. What is it about Sondheim’s music that makes people respond so strongly? “I think the thing is that he covers those grey areas, the shadows in between happy, sad or angry,” Langford says. “He shows human nature in its raw form, strips away the prettiness and shows some of the true imperfections of our lives. People get so passionate about it because he delves into the darkness.”
Darkness isn’t what we usually associate with Langford’s shiny, upbeat personality. I’m trying to avoid using the word “bubbly” but I can’t help it. “Bubbly, yes, there you go,” she sighs. She does love her work – “It’s my happy place, my safe place” – but inevitably there are bad days. “The difficulty I had when I was growing up was that I would say to somebody, ‘I’m not feeling it today.’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, are you depressed? You’re falling into some kind of emotional trauma? You’re going to rehab?’” She’s referring to the press here, mainly. “We’re all just living on the seesaw of life. You have a tricky patch, and sometimes you want to keep that private.”
She has had hard times, particularly while growing up and working out who she was when other people already thought they knew. “When I was in my 20s, I was doing 42nd Street and I was physically exhausted. My body was all over the shop, and I was going on stage thinking, ‘This is not making me happy any more.’ I just couldn’t find my place. I wasn’t a baby any more. I didn’t want to be ‘Bubbly Bonnie Langford’, but I didn’t know how to be anything else.”
She retreated to her friends and family, and to time alone, and found her way through. She’s a trouper after all. “I came from that generation where it was, ‘Don’t show people your vulnerabilities. Don’t wear your sadness on your sleeve. What’s going on in your life is not everybody else’s business or problem.’” So you’re not going to tell me about your traumas, I say. “No, I’m not!” She bursts into a joyful cackle. “I may be on the sofa but this isn’t therapy.”
There is more of a culture of sharing everything these days. Langford sees it with her daughter, Bibi Jay, who is also in musical theatre (most recently the show Heathers). “There are times when I go, ‘Ohh, careful!’ Because once it’s out there you can’t ever get it back.”
Performing is the family business. Langford is divorced from Bibi’s father, the actor Paul Grunert. Her great aunt was a ballerina called Daphne De Lisle (born Gladys Gaylor) who performed with Anna Pavlova. De Lisle ran a dance school which Langford’s mum, Babette took, over, so it was natural that the kids would take it up. Bonnie (Bonita) and her sisters Cherida and Petrina all got glamorous names they would never need to change. Her nieces are also actors, the Strallen sisters, Summer, Scarlett, Saskia and Zizi.
Langford is keen to point out that she never sought fame, but someone involved with the dance school worked at Thames Television and suggested her for Opportunity Knocks, and things just took off. Her mother was almost always her chaperone, and while no one talked about safeguarding in those days, Langford never felt vulnerable as a child in an adult world.
Things could be trickier as a young woman. At 16 she played Rumpleteazer in the original cast of Cats (“We had to do Shakespeare at the audition, which seems quite funny now”), and was full of confidence, but she realises now how young she was. She trusted her gut. There were certain people you wouldn’t get yourself into a one-to-one situation with. “I was very good at taking the mickey out of people. I remember somebody saying to me [lecherously], ‘Oh, you’re my little star.’ I’d go, ‘Oh shut up, that sounds so awful’ and I’d just laugh and go, ‘No, no, we’re not going there.’”
All performers have their insecurities and dancers are notorious perfectionists. “I went through a period in my life when I was striving for perfection,” Langford agrees. “And perfection is impossible. With dance, there are certain positions one has to achieve. But who decided that?” She notes the way technical standards have changed over the years and that dancers now are much slimmer and more athletic than in the past. “Margot Fonteyn would not be in a ballet company now – and yet look at the joy and the magic she created,” says Langford. “Because she was acting with her body.”
Fonteyn didn’t lift her legs sky high but that’s something Langford has no trouble doing, as anyone who saw her with her ankle by her ear on The Masked Dancer will know. Langford appeared as Squirrel in this Masked Singer spin-off in which anonymous celebrities dance in oversized costumes for a panel who have to guess their identity. She nailed up-to-the-minute R&B routines and the panel thought she was 30 years younger.
Even the director, the backstage crew and the backing dancers don’t know who the masked contestants are. “Before you get to the studio you have to put on a hoodie that says ‘Don’t speak to me,’” says Langford. “You wear a balaclava, a shield over your face, gloves and socks. You have pseudonyms, you’re not allowed to speak. It’s absolutely ridiculous. When I did my first rehearsal in my costume, I couldn’t see anything at all. I started to get hysterics, thinking, ‘What madness is this career?’”
It wasn’t Langford’s first foray into celebrity talent shows. She came third in the first season of Dancing on Ice in 2006, and found the experience liberating. “It was the first time I was able to say, ‘I don’t know how to do this.’” To get performing jobs in an ultra-competitive industry, she was always told not to admit she couldn’t do something. “And it’s taken a long time to be able to have the confidence to say to myself, ‘It’s OK, I can make a mistake and the world will still turn.’”
Even if some days Langford would rather be out walking her dog than sweating in the rehearsal studio, performing is still her happy place. She doesn’t read about herself in the press but she loves it when people come up and tell her about their lives instead. “When I did EastEnders they had this huge storyline about knife crime, and it really was so powerful that people would come up and pour their hearts out to me about things that had happened to them. I have an extraordinary job because I’m not really qualified for that – I’m literally pretending. But as a human being, it gives you that opportunity to connect.”
It goes back to what she was saying about Sondheim: “As performers you’re reflecting human nature.” For all that the world of musical theatre can seem like another planet to some people, “you’ve got to be connected to the real world,” she says. “Ultimately we are all just people who are trying to keep going.”
Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends is at the Gielgud theatre, London, until 6 January.
