Actress uses puppets to push role of arts in life

NEW YORK — On a wintry morning last month, Julie Andrews and daughter Emma Walton Hamilton breezed into the Jim Henson Co. Creature Shop in Queens, where they warmly greeted puppets hanging limply from a stand.

“Why, hello there!” said Andrews, 81, as if the fabric creations were close friends. In a way, they 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 Co. available beginning today on Netflix.

Andrews, an Oscar-, Emmy- and Grammy-winning actress, has worked with puppets before.

As a child actress in England, she serenaded a ventriloquist’s dummy in the radio show “Educating Archie.” In “The Sound of Music,” she yodeled with marionettes. 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 co-created, -wrote and -produced the show with Hamilton and Judy Rothman Rofe, an Emmy-winning writer on “Madeline” and other children’s programs.

On the show, she plays Ms. Julie, who teaches a performing-arts class to five puppet pupils. During the 13-episode debut season, Ms. Julie and celebrity guests (including Alec Baldwin, Idina Menzel,

Josh Groban and Carol Burnett) inspire the young thespians to create and perform a 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 more.

“The hardest part for us with the show,” Andrews said, “was not to get preachy but also to make it wildly entertaining.”

After the Henson Co. approached Andrews and Hamilton with the show concept, the project was shopped to Netflix in late 2015.

“One of the things that attracted us was not so much that Julie was attached,” said Andy Yeatman, director of global kids content for the streaming service, “but that this was a topic she cared a lot about: building a love for the performing arts in kids.”

Andrews and Hamilton, together with Rofe, spent a week last winter mapping out the show’s narrative arc and writing the pilot episode.

Next came the creation and building of the show’s seven puppet characters. Ms. Julie’s five pupils represent a rainbow coalition, with one 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, an actress turned writer and arts educator, chimed in: “If pressed, we’d say that she’s a girl but maybe not forever. We wanted to be as diverse as possible.”

Andrews and Hamilton, 54, weighed in extensively on the puppets as they were being created at the Creature Shop. They helped choose hair color and texture, outfits, even nose shapes.

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. After spending six weeks shooting the series at Grumman Studios in Bethpage, New York, though, he came to regard his energetic co-star as his honorary grandmother.

“She’d share stories and get me her favorite 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,” said Menzel, who was especially impressed by the veteran star’s polite perfectionism.

“We would rewrite things on the spot to make them better.... She wanted to get things right, but she did it with grace.”

Several of the guest stars sing with Andrews, warbling original songs. After a botched surgery on her vocal cords 20 years ago, Andrews’ once four-octave range is now reduced to one. These days, she speak-sings.

“I have about three or four good bass notes left,” she said.

Andrews said she despaired, postsurgery, because her whole identity “was being able to sing and the joy of it.” She eventually realized that there were other ways to incorporate music into her life.

“The arrangements, the scoring,” she said, “it’s something I’m so passionate about.”