By BILL VARBLE

Mail Tribune

There is a moment in "As You Like It" when characters dance in joyous celebration of the multiple weddings that signal the happy ending. In the new production of that good-hearted comedy that kicked off the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2007 season Friday night, Robert Sicular, playing the melancholy Jaques, stands symbolically apart from the others, at the rear of the stage, his gaze fixed on something in the distance.

Jaques is not without wit, or wisdom, but he is loveless and thus cannot be part of the celebration of love and reconciliation that is the play's culmination. It is an understated moment, and easy to miss, and the production could have used more like it.

"As You Like It," directed by J.R. Sullivan, goes to show that good staging can't overcome wrongheaded characterization.

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"As You Like It" is not among Shakespeare's best plays, but it is, despite a curious lack of action, or even plot, an audience favorite. There are laughs, there is the wonderful Rosalind, and there is an irresistible sunniness in the forest of Arden.

"As You Like It" can stand being played fast, with lots of energy, but the jokes must not be played so broadly as to interfere with the theme, and that is what happens here.

Although Shakespeare has drawn some broadly comic characters, and he has fun with the pastoral tradition, and suggests that in the end neither court nor country has the best of everything, the play's deeper level is about love.

Sicular gives a nuanced performance as a complex Jaques. The other main characters are a different story.

Miriam A. Laube plays Rosalind — one of the great women in all Shakespeare — as a silly adolescent. She bats her eyes, mock faints, mugs for the audience, shoots eye darts of lust and generally moons and carries on until you think a little Valentine heart will spring out of her breast and throb in the air like a lovestruck swain in an old Warner Brothers cartoon.

Laube is a talented actor but is here working too hard in service of the wrong idea. Rosalind is not a giddy, blushing ingenue. She embodies not only love but wit and wisdom, the whole package. She drives everything that happens and single-handedly arranges everybody's happy ending.

This looks like Gidget goes to Arden.

The Touchstone situation is equally bad. You can see how directors are tempted to use the fool for laughs, because they are surely there to be had. And when a wrongly conceived Touchstone is played by a comic actor as talented as David Kelly, it's even worse, because he's so good.

If Rosalind is wit and wisdom and love, Touchstone is wit minus both love and wisdom. He is a man who has rotted and rotted.

Consider the snobbery and the sophistry in Touchstone's treatment of Corin. Ah, say the defenders of a clownish Touchstone, it's absurd, written just for laughs. If that were true, Shakespeare, the keen observer of the human heart, would show us Corin's unworthiness. Instead, Corin tells the fool he earns that he eats, gets that he wears, owes no man hate and envies no man's happiness. It is a fine creed, and one that puts the fool to shame.

Consider Touchstone's treatment of Audrey. Sure, she's a comic foil, but she's not an unsympathetic character, and within her has been awaked the spark of love. So Touchstone calls her a slut (of the many big laughs he got Friday, this was the only one that was tinged with a bit of shock or horror). When she asks if he would not have her honest, he remarks that "to cast away honesty upon a foul slut were to put good meat into an unclean dish."

Again and again, Shakespeare waves Touchstone in front of us as if to demonstrate the old notion that those who spend all their time demeaning others in the end demean themselves.

Sullivan has staged the play in a 1930s America Great Depression theme, and that works nicely. The early scenes at Duke Frederick's court were like those glitzy Warner Brothers escapist films of the 1930s. The mythical forest, to which everybody repairs, and where we spend most of our time, suggested another mythical realm of the 1930s: the open road and the hobo jungles of vagabonds and drifters and refugees.

William Bloodgood designed huge, enchanted flats of leafy forest motifs that moved about as the scenes changed. John Tanner's music serves the play well, the wrestling match in Act 1 Scene 2 is terrific, and there are some good turns in the minor roles.

"As You Like It" runs about three hours with an intermission. It plays through Oct. 28.

Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or bvarble@mailtribune.com.