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Our relationship with music begins before almost everything else, an acoustic connection which is created even before a baby is born, Broadway legend Julie Andrews says.
“What is the first thing a mum does to a baby?” the 81-year-old star of The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins asks, in that tone which both gently challenges but also reassures that the answer is coming in a moment. “She sings to it.”
Andrews, in collaboration with her daughter Emma Walton-Hamilton, is turning that very gentle idea into a television series, Julie’s Greenroom, which steps into the early childhood education space using melody, poetry and puppetry.
The Netflix series, developed in collaboration with Judy Rothman Rofe, with whom Andrews and Walton-Hamilton have worked previously, seems to consciously step into the Sesame Street space, complete with puppets from the Henson Company.
Julie Andrews’ new Netflix show teaches kids how fun the performing arts can be. She and her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton talk about all the wonderful lessons children can learn from the stage. USA TODAY
Idina Menzel
The Frozen actress pops in for the first episode to introduce the Greenies to different types of plays and invite them on a field trip to Broadway’s Wicked, for which she won a best-actress Tony Award playing the Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba. Menzel “is such an arts advocate herself,” Hamilton says. “She runs this wonderful outreach program for urban girls (A Broader Way), providing them with the means through the arts to find their voices, so that was just a natural fit.” Plus, “I do not know one kid that isn’t singing Frozen,” Andrews says.
Alec Baldwin
Saturday Night Live’s Donald Trump impersonator-in-chief sheds the blond comb-over to teach the Greenies about acting and share a song with Andrews. “He was very proud to be singing,” she says. “He had just finished a duet with Barbra Streisand (for her album, Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway), so I had heavy competition.” The original tune “is a tribute to what you do when you act, and we keep topping each other. It’s great fun. He’s brilliant in it, because he’s a wonderful impersonator anyway, so he’s suddenly doing one character and then another and another, and explaining how you can be anything when you act.”
