National Post (National Edition)
Julie Andrews teams up with Jim Henson’s puppets for a kids’ show.
THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF JULIE ANDREWS AND HENSON COMPANY CREATURES
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, New York, 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 produced by the Henson Company and available on Netflix beginning March 17. She was particularly partial to Hugo the Duck, a character she created, stroking his feathered 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 apologized. “I just wanted to lift his feathers up a bit,” she said.
Andrews, an Oscar-, Emmyand Grammy-winning actress 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 actress 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.
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’ programs. 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.”
Andrews is keenly aware that her new show is entering a rapidly changing children’s television world. The traditional major networks and even the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon are losing young viewers to streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime, which are plumping up their kids’ programming with ever more offerings. Netflix currently streams more than 40 of its own children’s shows, including A Series of Unfortunate Events and Trollhunters, while Amazon offers 15 originals, such as Annedroids and Tumble Leaf. And HBO, which streams via HBO Go and HBO Now, cut a deal a year ago to air new episodes of Sesame Street nine months before they appear on PBS.
“When I was growing up, I watched The Smurfs on Saturday morning,” said Rich Greenfield, an analyst specializing in technology and media at BTIG Research, referring to the NBC cartoon show from the 1980s. “That was the definition of kids’ TV. Kids today don’t even think about turning on the TV networks or cable on Saturday. They want it on demand, and that’s how they’re used to getting it.”
For the streaming services, in particular, their treasure trove of data clearly show what their viewers crave: According to Netflix, more than half of its 93 million members in nearly 200 countries, for example, regularly watch its children’s shows.
“Children’s content is important, because it’s our first opportunity to build brand love for Netflix that we hope will last a lifetime,” said Andy Yeatman, director of global kids content at Netflix.
The real targets, of course, are parents who pay the subscription fees. “Kids’ content gives the household a reason to subscribe, because kids watch every single day,” Greenfield said.
Following their shmooz with the puppets, Andrews and Hamilton discussed the birthing process for their show over scones and coffee in a conference room at the Creature Shop. The women have an easy rapport, built up not only as mother and daughter but also as the coauthors of more than 30 popular children’s books, including the Dumpy the Dump Truck and The Very Fairy Princess series. (Andrews has four other children, including two stepchildren, as well as 10 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.)
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 actress’ home in Sag Harbor, N.Y. The peripatetic Andrews, a widow since the death in 2010 of director Blake Edwards, now considers Sag Harbor, a former whaling village (where Hamilton also lives), her primary residence.
Next came the creation and building of the show’s seven puppet characters (which include a dog and Hugo the Duck). 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.”
Hamilton, 54, an actress turned writer and arts educator, chimed in. “If pressed, we’d say that she’s a girl, but maybe not forever,” she said. “We wanted to be as diverse as possible.”
Andrews and Hamilton weighed in extensively when the puppets were being designed and built at the Creature Shop. They helped choose hair colour and texture, outfits, even nose shapes.
“Mom, remember the 17 different fabric swatches we went through for Peri’s skirt?” Hamilton asked, referring to the diva-in-training puppet.
“Yes!” Andrews replied. “We wanted it as icing pink as possible.”
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.
“I was a bit in awe when I first walked in,” he said of meeting Andrews. But after spending six weeks of nearly 15-hour days shooting the series at Grumman Studios in Bethpage, N.Y., he came to regard his energetic costar as his honorary grandmother. “She’d share stories and get me her favourite tea, a British brand called PG Tips.” The biggest surprise? “That Julie Andrews at the end of the day wants a martini.”
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.
“You don’t say no to Julie Andrews,” Menzel said.
After working with her on Julie’s Greenroom, Menzel said, she’s especially impressed by the veteran star’s polite perfectionism. “We would rewrite things on the spot to make them better. She doesn’t settle. She wanted to get things right, but she did it with grace.”
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.”
Andrews said she despaired, post-surgery, because her whole identity “was being able to sing and the joy of it.” She eventually realized — “it was a great lifesaver” — that there were other ways to incorporate music into her life.
Hamilton nodded. “In this show, Mom was very hands-on with the songs and the underscoring,” she said.
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 longrunning 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.”
JULIE ANDREWS AT THE END OF THE DAY WANTS A MARTINI.