Here’s to the Ladies… Bonnie Langford – Crazy Coqs

Here’s to the Ladies… Bonnie Langford at Crazy Coqs, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Precocious winner of the star-making TV talent show Opportunity Knocks when she was six, on Broadway playing Baby June in Gypsy when she was eight, the original Rumpleteazer in Cats, West End star for five decades, the amazingly flexible Bonnie Langford picked the perfect number ‘I’m Still Here’ to close her Here’s to the Ladies show at the Crazy Coqs.

Of course she’s still here – what would we do without this national treasure? – and still an incredible all-round performer and great storyteller even when it is a story against herself. Like the one involving Noel Coward on her West End debut at age seven. She was Bonnie Butler in the doomed musical version of the epic Margaret Mitchell novel Gone With the Wind and on the night Coward was in the audience her horse Charlie proved he was real by doing an onstage dump to make a bad evening even more embarrassing.

When asked by producer Harold Fielding at the first-night party how he could improve the show, back came Coward’s waspish reply: “Solve two problems at once… shove the child up the horse’s arse” – adding a catty afterthought “Cut the second act and the child’s throat!” Cruel humour that could have scarred a child forever.

Not our Bonnie, though! It didn’t take long before she was wowing them in Gypsy in London and New York, and she’s still wowing them today, having uniquely played ingenue and ageing prima donna in 42nd Street, taken over from Felicity Kendal as the dotty Evangeline Harcourt in Anything Goes and lit up the stage in Sondheim’s Old Friends. This weekend we’ll see another string to her bow when she hosts the Sondheim Society’s Student Performer of the Year.

The copper-haired Langford is carded to do a couple of Sondheim numbers then while the judges are deliberating and if they are the two hilarious ones she performed at Crazy Coqs, ‘Can That Boy Foxtrot’ (written for Follies but never used) and the treacherously difficult ‘The Boy From…’, the wicked ‘Girl From Ipanema’ spoof Sondheim wrote with Mary Rodgers for a TV show, there will be no complaints.

The Sondheim funnies and a Bob Fosse medley – Langford was one of many Roxie Harts in Chicago – featuring ‘(Hey) Big Spender’, ‘If My Friends Could See Me Now’ and, inevitably ‘All That Jazz’ brought this delightfully energetic, high-kicking 90 minutes to a soaring conclusion, with the excellent Anthony England on piano, before she gave a full-house audience that ‘I’m Still Here’ encore.

The great showbiz ladies she has met, worshipped or acted with from Ethel Merman down, was the theme of the beautifully crafted set which kicked off with ‘One’ from A Chorus Line followed by the imprecation to ‘Use What You’ve Got’ (from The Life) – “Monday you’re hot, Tuesday you’re not… you gotta use whatcha got, to get whatcha want, before you ain’t got no more” – which is exactly what Langford has been doing almost her entire life.

The tribute to Angela Lansbury who was a mother to her “on and off the stage” during their time together on Gypsy was particularly heartfelt. ‘Growing Up Isn’t Easy’, written by Charles Strouse and Don Black for the 1986 TV film The Worst Witch, spelt out some of the bumps along the road.

Singing ‘Memory’, she recalled her time with Cats when Elaine Paige came in at three days’ notice to bale the show out after Judi Dench had to withdraw because of injury. Apparently Barbra Streisand dropped in to see it unannounced and semi-incognito but left at the interval “with a migraine”.

There was a touching tribute to tragic anorexia victim Lena Zavaroni, another child prodigy who also found fame through winning Opportunity Knocks – she became great friends with the Scottish singer when they studied together at Italia Conti – “sadly remembered more for her illness than her talent”. And ‘Shine’ was in memory of the late, great Haydn Gwynne – they were due to work together on Sondheim’s Old Friends.

While Langford wouldn’t claim to have the greatest voice in the world, she certainly knows how to put a song across and it is surprisingly powerful when needed. But there’s so much more to this fabulous trouper. She can dance up a storm, put on a cabaret full of the stagey stories we love to hear, do the splits, act with the best of them and win any audience over with her sparkly, upbeat personality.

Add impersonator to her portfolio. She used that gift when she went pop in her 1960s ladies mash-up of the hits of Lulu, Cilla, Dusty, Petula and ‘I’ve Got You Babe’ Cher. This is a lady who can turn her hand to almost anything and it’s all done by hard work. Once upon a time, as Baby June, she would sing ‘May We Entertain You’. Fifty years on and the ever-youthful Langford is doing that as brilliantly as ever.

Jeremy Chapman