Ms Julie is here!

Playful notes: To emphasise the value of performing arts in children's growing-up years, actor Julie Andrews has brought a puppet show to life.

New York — On a wintry morning last month, Julie Andrews and her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton breezed into the Jim Henson Company’s Creature Shop in Queens, where they warmly greeted puppets hanging limply from a stand.

“Why, hello there!” said Andrews, 81, hailing the foam and fabric creations as if they were close friends. They sort of are. The puppets — animated and voiced by skilled puppeteers — star alongside Andrews in Julie’s Greenroom, a new children’s show. She was particularly partial to Hugo the Duck, a character she created, stroking his feather head until her daughter gently chided her. “Mom, you shouldn’t keep touching him,” Hamilton said. “We’re not supposed to get oil on them.” Andrews quickly apologised. “I just wanted to lift his feathers up a bit,” she said.

Andrews, an Oscar-, Emmy- and Grammy-winning actor who is as warm and forthright in person as anyone who grew up loving Mary Poppins would expect her to be, has worked with puppets before. As a child actor in England, she serenaded a ventriloquist’s dummy in Educating Archie, a popular radio show. In The Sound of Music, she yodelled with marionettes. And on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, she vamped with their goggle-eyed denizens.

Parent to puppets

The difference now? She helped bring these latest puppets into existence. Besides starring in Julie’s Greenroom, Andrews helped create, write and produce the show with Hamilton and Judy Rothman Rofé, an Emmy-winning writer on Madeline and other kids’ programmes.

On the show, she plays Ms Julie, who teaches a performing arts class to five puppet pupils. Over the debut season’s 13 episodes, Ms Julie and celebrity guests (including Alec Baldwin, Idina Menzel, Josh Groban, Carol Burnett and David Hyde Pierce) inspire the eager young thespians to create and perform an original musical.

Both mother and daughter want the show to champion the vital role they see the performing arts play in teaching children critical thinking, empathy, tolerance and communication skills. “It’s the bridge across all countries,” Andrews said, referring to drama, dance and music. “The hardest part for us with the show was not to get preachy but also to make it wildly entertaining.”

The women have an easy rapport, built up not only as mother and daughter but also as the co-authors of more than 30 popular children’s books, including the Dumpy the Dump Truck and The Very Fairy Princess series.

After the Henson Company approached Andrews and Hamilton with the show’s concept, the project was shopped to Netflix in late 2015; Yeatman and his team quickly said yes. “One of the things that attracted us was not so much that Julie was attached, but that this was a topic she cared a lot about: building a love for the performing arts in kids,” Yeatman said.

Then the real work started. Andrews and Hamilton, together with Rofé, spent a week last winter mapping out the show’s narrative arc and writing the pilot episode at the actor’s home in Sag Harbor, New York.

Next came the creation and building of the show’s seven puppet characters. Ms Julie’s five pupils are a true rainbow coalition, including one who is in a wheelchair and another who is seemingly gender neutral. “That’s Riley; she loves all the technical backstage stuff,” Andrews said, pointing to an androgynous puppet sporting shortish red hair and round glasses. “She’s a girl.”

Andrews and Hamilton weighed in extensively when the puppets were being designed and built at the Creature Shop.

The women also sat in on final casting sessions to pick an actor to play Gus, Ms Julie’s (human) assistant. Giullian Yao Gioiello (The Carrie Diaries) won the role after strumming his guitar and demonstrating his human-beat-box prowess.

Andrews and Hamilton also lined up many of the show’s celebrity guest stars. In the first episode, Menzel introduces the pupils to Broadway musicals. Ms Julie informs them that Menzel was the voice of Elsa in Disney’s Frozen, a credit sure to impress young viewers more than her Broadway credits from Wicked or Rent.

Several of the guest stars sing with Andrews, warbling original songs. Following a botched surgery on her vocal cords 20 years ago, her once four-octave range is now reduced to one. These days, she speak-sings. “I touch what notes I can and say the others,” Andrews said. “I have about three or four good bass notes left. I could sing you a terrific version of Old Man River.”

Optimistic about alternatives

Andrews said she despaired, post-surgery, because her whole identity “was being able to sing and the joy of it.” She eventually realised — “It was a great lifesaver” — that there were other ways to incorporate music into her life. Hamilton nodded. Andrews added, “The arrangements, the scoring — it’s something I’m so passionate about.”

It shows. In one of the most spirited scenes, cast members from the long-running off-Broadway show Stomp visit to teach percussion. In an extended jam session, filmed in one long take, the Stomp cast, Gus and the puppet pupils turn everyday objects in their classroom in an old theatre into instruments. Ms Julie joins in, picking up a china teacup and rhythmically whacking at it with a spoon. The action was unscripted. “Who better than an English mum to pick up a teacup and start banging away?” Andrews said, laughing. “That’s serendipity.”