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Legally Blonde Goes Country
Paging Reese Witherspoon! You're wanted on
Broadway!
Laura Bell Bundy, who stars
as Elle Woods in the Legally Blonde
musical, is hopeful the original Elle will show
up one of these days.
And she better not come alone!
"I would love for her to bring
Jake Gyllenhaal," Bundy jokes.
I'm on the phone with Bundy from her New York
apartment. The actress-singer, who earned a Tony
nomination this year for her work as Elle, is
getting ready to attend the premiere of the
Hairspray movie (she originated the role of
bitchy beauty queen Amber Von Tussle in
Broadway's Hairspray).
She's having an Elle momentBundy doesn't
know what she's going to wear for the red carpet
premiere.
"I'm thinking of wearing this gold Michael
Kors dress that I have," Bundy says. "But I wore
it on the opening night [of Legally Blonde]
in San Francisco. I can't wear it again...but I
didn't get any pictures taken in San Francisco.
It's perfect because it's kind of '60s looking."
Whew! With her clothing dilemma behind her,
Bundy can now talk about her latest project. The
Kentucky native's debut album, Longing for a
Place Already Gone, drops on July 24. It's
a collection of country songs that Bundy either
wrote or cowrote.
Well, except one song.
The last track is a cover of Billy
Idol's "Dancing with Myself."
"I was dancing at a club one night in L.A.
and 'Dancing with Myself' came on. I was like,
'This is so much fun,'" Bundy remembers. "And I
really do like dancing with myself, like alone
in my apartment. Sometimes with clothes and
sometimes without. So I was like I have to cover
this. I have to do a hillbilly version of this
song."
Bundy may only be 26, but she's a
show-business veteran. At age 10, she starred in
the off-Broadway Ruthless! The Musical.
Her understudies? Britney Spears and
Natalie Portman!
She wasn't particularly close to Spears ("She
was a very sweet kid," she remembers), but she
and Portman bonded as only preteens can. "We had
sleepovers," Bundy says.
While Spears and Portman continued in the
business, Bundy returned to Kentucky for high
school. But shortly after graduation, she
hightailed it back to New York and on to Los
Angeles, where she spent two years as Marah
Lewis on the CBS soap opera The Guiding
Light.
So why country? "When I started writing
music, it all came out country," Bundy says. "I
love country music, I tell you. I like the older
stuff. I'm not as big a fan of the more popular
stuff these days."
When I mention that Dolly Parton is one of my idols,
Bundy squeals, "Honey, I was singing 'Islands in
the Stream' when I was four years old!"
But now the tables have turned. Bundy's fans
are singing her songs. "We have people who come
twice, three times a week," Bundy says of the
more rabid Legally Blonde fans that go
by names like the Delta Nu's, the Blondes or the
Teen Blondes. "They see the show all the time."
But that pales in comparison to her time on
The Guiding Light. "There is
nothing like a soap opera fan. They talk to you
like you are your character. They ask you, 'Why
are you dating a member of the mafia?' and I'm
like, 'Um, that's my character.'
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