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SHE'S PLAYED a singing nun, a flying nanny, a spy, a homosexualPolish count, a queen - the royal kind - and a loyal, lovingwife. Now Julie Andrews has come full circle - she's playing herself. After a hiatus of more than 25 years from the theater, Andrews - everyone's definition of the word "nice" - has returned to live performing. Her two-month tour of the States stops off for four nearly sold-out evenings next week at the Westbury Music Fair.
But what better place than Valley Forge for an Englishwoman to begin another conquest of the Colonies? "Am I nervous?" It was the eve of her first performance of the tour, and she was seated on the edge of a chair in the dressing room at the Valley Forge Music Fair. "Arrrgh," she groaned, tousling her bright red hair, which was stylishly unkempt. "I feel like my poor brains are scrambled."
An evening with Julie Andrews - the kind you enjoy for 75 minutes with 3,000 other paying customers - isn't exactly the Broadway stage, and she'll not be sharing her spotlight (nor the credit) with Rex Harrison or Richard Burton.
But Broadway is a crucial ingredient in her musical retrospective, and so is vaudeville, because Andrews was mu- sic-hall trained, and she first sang professionally at the London Hippodrome at age 12. And a chunk of her heritage is Hollywood: This is, after all, the same woman whose image - a veddy proper lady with understated moral strength - is nearly synonymous with characters like Maria Von Trapp and Modern Millie and Mary Poppins.
"I think . . . I suppose . . ." She dropped her eyes down and rested her chin on a palm. Outside the Music Fair, a promising autumn sun had dipped behind a black cloud. "I'm an actress," she said, and looked up, "and people tend to feel that Maria Von Trapp is what I really am, and they forget it was an acting role.
"And the enormous success of films like `Sound of Music' - which I certainly don't knock - but they were so huge, that people were inclined to think, `Oh, that's what she does.' Not just that's what she does . . . but...