There is a certain kind of play the OSF consistently does as well as anybody, anywhere. It’s a witty comedy or farce, either English or classic American, opening in the Bowmer at the start of the season. This play is all about timing. It’s Wilde or Coward or Michael Frayne.

This year it’s Tom Stoppard’s “On the Razzle,” and it’s happening tonight (Saturday).

This is a really big show (I resist the temptation to say a really big shoe). Stoppard is Stoppard, and Laid Williamson has a way with big shows. Consider Cyrano de Bergerac or Life is a Dream at OSF. He’s worked with top LA composer Larry Delinger forever. Delinger scored last year’s King John and the recent Much Ado, Antony and Cleo and a striking Good Person of Szechuan a few years back.

He told me there is something funny about a xylophone. Just innately funny. It was my favorite quote of the run-up to the openings.

So look for the xylophone in the incidental music for Razzle. And he’s right. Just the little bit I’ve heard, there is a sort of manic/comic/big city/out-of-control-kinetic kind of energy about it.

Tony DeBruno figures to be a good Zangler, the boss. The two who go on the razzle (an expression understood to involve the consumption of immoderate quantities of alcohol and all that implies) are young guns Rex Young and Tasso Feldman. Young played Polixenes in last year’s Winter’s Tale, a small part, and I don’t know Feldman.

For sheer fun, this is the best bet of the weekend.

I should confess straightaway to looking forward to “The Cherry Orchard” this afternoon (Saturday) with unnatural anticipation. It’s the best play by an amazing writer

Consider Chekhov. He comes from a bankrupt peasant family and writes some of the greatest plays since W. Shake, all the while a practicing doctor — and he’s dying of TB the whole time! He starts schools and initiates other enlightened measures for the poor, and he somehow becomes a maniac gardener

Yes, he planted a cherry orchard.

Chekhov is the first guy to look at the stage and say: life isn’t like that.

He’s right. Don’t know about you, but I don’t spend every day falling in love or shooting somebody or giving immortal soliloquies. People in plays should eat lunch and chat and drift away from each other, C said, and here’s the tricky part: it must all mean something to audiences. It should all somehow open a window through which we glimpse the very essence of life passing us like a breeze, so that maybe we don’t wind up like Firs in the Cherry Orchard.

So a silly aristocratic woman fritters away her estate in 1904 Russia despite warnings that she’s blowing it. “Nothing happens,” as some people say, then everybody drifts off except an old servant, who is left behind, forgotten, to die.
The old fight is whether this is a comedy or a tragedy. Chekhov insisted it was a comedy, almost a farce. Stanislavski, who directed at the Moscow Art Theatre, was just as vehement that it was a tragedy, telling C he didn’t know what he’d written.

Clurman, who saw the Moscow Art Theatre touring production in 1924, with Olga Knipper, Chekhov’s wife, playing Madam Ravensky, said it was played faster and more comically than later American productions he’d seen. From this we conclude that the American practice for much of the 20th century was a slower and sadder Cherry Orchard than than the one that Chekhov considered too slow and too sad!

When I asked Todd Barton, who wrote the music, the tragedy/comedy question, he said there was an ambiguity about the play, and that tragic/comic wasn’t a question he was concerned with.

Libby Appel told me straight out it’s ironically comic, as did translator Allison Horsley.

Judith-Marie Bergan will play Ranevsky. Come to think of it, you have Ranevsky and Rosalind, two of the great roles for women, each in a play in which “nothing happens,” in less than 24 hours.

Bergan was formidable as Lady Bracknell last year. Lyubov is a complex role. The thing with Lyubov is that she’s a fool who cannot help but mess up. And she functions as the villain, driving the play’s action, what there is of it. Yet Chekhov has drawn her affectionately.

Richard Howard is the feckless Gaev. Armando Duran figures to be an intense Lopakhin, just because he’s intense. The key to Lopakhin is he’s not a bad guy, and he should not be played as a scheming, avaricious upstart. He too is more complex that that.

There should be no orations in any of this. You don’t emote Chekhov lines like Richard III.

I didn’t buy the rationale for The Great Depression setting (something about the quest to find the self in a journey of renewal, uncertainty, challenges to the will, unclear threats) for the OSF’s new As You Like It, which opened last night, but it turns out it works just fine.

But — in the end it goes to show the relative importance of nice staging versus intelligent characterizations.
Because both Rosalind and Touchstone were off. Of the play’s three main roles, only the dour/philosophical Jaques, played by Robert Sicular, was on the money.

Miriam A. Laube played Rosalind as a giddy schoolgirl, which is odd since she orchestrates things. David Kelly played Touchstone as a lovable clown. Rosalind is the whole package of wit, wisdom and love, and she should not be played as a blushing adolescent.

When I hear audiences laugh and laugh at Touchstone, I’m always amazed. Of course, he can be quite funny if he’s played by an actor as good as Kelly — if you don’t listen too closely to what he says.

William Bloodgood’s set was spare and dominated by large, leafy flats that would glide in and out of place as the action moved to different parts of the Forest of Arden. John Tanner’s faux-30s tunes added to the ambiance.

There are some nice moments, but the real story is still somewhere out there in the forest with the lions and the snakes and the magic.

Can you imagine the NCAA tournamnent committee randomly sprinkling teams into the playoff bracket on Selection Sunday, with no regard to seeding?

If that happened, you inevitably would have a first-round matchup of say, No. 1-ranked Wisconsin against No. 5 North Carolina.

Wouldn’t that be preposterous?

Seeding, or ranking teams based on records, strength of schedule and other factors, is implemented to insulate top-tier teams from having to play other heavyweights in the early rounds. Theoretically, the higher seeds — the better teams — move through the bracket and don’t square off against one another until the Sweet 16 and beyond.

Of course there are upsets, and that’s part of the beauty of the Big Dance.

Still, seeding is a logical and largely fair distribution system, and it needs to be incorporated into the state playoffs in Oregon high school basketball.

Much has been made of Oregon City, currently ranked No. 6 in the Class 6A state poll, facing a likely trip to No. 2 South Medford in the play-in game to the state tournament. The Pioneers, who have been ranked as high as No. 3, finished second to No. 1-ranked Lake Oswego in the Three Rivers League.

In a seeding scenario, they wouldn’t be matched up against South Medford unless the two teams met in Eugene, site of the final eight.

A closer look at the 6A bracket finds not only South Medford and Oregon City on the lower half of the 24-team bracket, but also No. 4 Canby, No. 8 Central Catholic and No. 9 Canby. That’s five teams in the top nine.

On the opposite side, only three such teams — No. 1 Lake Oswego, No. 5 Sheldon and No. 7 Westview — reside.

The Oregon School Activities Association seeded the tournament once — in 2002 — only to abandon it after attendance hit an all-time low. That was a coincidence. Seeding is common sense, and it needs to come back for the 2007-2008 season.

Anyone with grade-school aged kids here knows that they must share some sort of genetic mutation which allows them to sense when a night’s surprise dose of snow will result in school closures.

At 5:30 a.m., my son Ben sticks his nose in my sleeping grill and bellows, “YOU SHOULD SEE ALL THE SNOW OUTSIDE!”

This is the same kid who has to have his covers stolen at 7:20 a.m. to get him out of bed on a school day. But if there’s snow, BAM, he senses the accumulation and is up and ready to partake.

At 5:45, he woke his sister, Maggie, almost 7 years old. Now it’s not even light out and I had two rabid snow chihuahuas to deal with.

At 6:15, they thought it was an injustice that he couldn’t go outside and play, and I’m a bad dad for it.

Then, at 7:40 a.m., Medford finally killed the school day. It would take a Taser to keep these kids inside and I didn’t have bail money, so I relented.

Snowball fights, angels, a snowman that looked a little like Alfred Hitchcock quickly ensued. And that was just me.

They did much of the same, too. Even took batting practice on iceballs that shattered at the crack of aluminum.

When all were good and soaked we changed clothes, put the rig in 4 wheel drive and buzzed around east Medford, purposefully speeding through slush piles to see how far the muck can shoot.

Yeah, that was us. Whaddya expect when you mix 3 inches of snow with two kids and a slightly immature Fish Hack.

Winter’s not always just about winter steelhead. Besides, when the Rogue is running chocolate and the little tax deductions are getting rowdy, a morning in the snow sure can take the edge off a day at the Fish Wrap.

Though my old I-can-sense-there’s-snow-outside gene has gone recessive in middle age, I’m glad my two little mutants were there to take care of me.

Here’s a flash. A source says incoming OSF Artistic Director Bill Rauch will announce the OSF’s 2008 season — his first — at Shakespeare’s March 9 member event.

“It’s a different kind of season,” the source said.

No word on what that looks like yet.

There’s a feeling at the festival that it’s kinda weird to announce the next year’s season just two wks. after the current one opens. But things move fast, and they need to get a jump on lining up free-lance directors and designers and other guest artists for the following year.

A reader says she can’t access the new music from each of the four opening OSF plays this weekend she heard was supposed to be up on our Web site. If you wonder what the music will sound like for the new As You Like It, or maybe On the Razzle, here’s a quick way to get to it:

Log on directly to www.mailtribune.com/shakespeare, and you’ll be on a page with a story about the four composers who wrote original music for the new plays. There are four buttons to click, one for each play/composer. See what you think.

OK, if I were truly a dedicated blogger, I would have kept the blogs coming for the past several days. Got to work on that. What really happened: I spent two days trying to catch up from being gone for a week, and then spent two days home in bed, sick. But I’m back, and, upper respiratory issues notwithstanding, ready to blog again.

I’ll keep it short: More video on our Web Multimedia site to check out — a couple of snow videos and a very cool piece on a local music group, AnnieMac. Things are changing here at the ol’ Muddy Turbine, that’s for sure.

We’re still trying to figure out how much time to spend on things like video. The snow videos were not time-consuming, but the music piece was. A good use of our resources? We’ll be sorting that out over time.

The morning of opening night.

It all starts at 8 p.m. in the Bowmer with “As You Like It,” which seems right.

And the opening plays are all over the map, as usual. A sunny Shakespeare comedy, Chekhov’s dark-comic/ironic masterpiece, the Stoppard farce, a newish kitchen sink drama.

“As You Like It” (Friday night) is far from being among the best plays in the Shakespeare Canon. There is no villain or antagonist, in fact no real obstacle to completion of the plot’s objective: the triumph of romantic love.

And nothing really happens, except some people go into a forest, which they keep calling a “desert.” Once there they sort of hang out and bounce off each other and yak yak yak in what we could see as little verbal/philosphical duets, trios, quartets and choruses.

But AYLI is irresistibly good-spirited, and it’s usually fun.

Director JR Sullivan has set it in 1930s America, the aptness of which is not immediately obvious. Can you see Woody Guthrie running around the Forest of Arden with a guitar? Duke Senior played by FDR? The Kingfish, Huey Long, is the bad duke. Jaques is a bipolar Will Rogers on his depressive cycle (Rogers never met a man he didn’t like; Jaques never met a man he liked). WPA crews and CCC camps all over Arden. …

John Tanner, who wrote original music for the production, told me that Sullivan and the design team decided AYLI was about identity and change. Hmm. I always thought it was about the pastoral life versus the court (not real rustic life with dirt and stuff, but a popular Renaissance genre of poetry). And on a deeper level, it’s about love, with Willy the Shake once again sounding like a fifth Beatle.

The main thing in AYLI is a good Rosalind. She doesn’t have much of an arc. She falls in love w/ Orlando in Act 1 Scene 2 and spends the rest of the play benignly manipulating everybody. Still, she’s a delight, and it’s one of the great roles in all Shake, a notch behind Lear, Hamlet, Falstaff, etc., an elite few. Miriam A. Laube was a good enough Hermione in Winter’s Tale and Julia in Two Gents, but in AYLI it’s up to Rosalind to carry the play. She hasn’t had a part like this at OSF.

Another key is Touchstone. Audiences often insist on taking him as a likeable clown. He is not. First, he’s not a clown, he’s a fool. There’s a big difference. A clown is a bumpkin and figure of ridicule whose action is usually outside the main plot. A fool is a professional entertainer/quipster who is involved w/ the other characters and has license to comment on their foibles.

Nor is Touchstone likeable. Instead of needling one’s betters, as a self-respecting fool does, he lords it over his social inferiors, or tries to. Contrast his arrogant tomfoolery with the simple dignity of the shepherd Corin, whom he mocks. And then there’s T’s idea of marriage. It is simply about lust, and one woman is as good as another. Contrast with Rosalind’s outlook on romantic love. She is a lovely character in whom we sense depths. Touchstone is a shallow, rather unsavory character.

Dennis Murphy is the obvious choice for Southwest Conference boys basketball coach of the year. Murphy guided South Medford to the conference championship and even has the Panthers ranked nationally in the USA Today poll. It’s not as easy as it looks to coach a loaded team. The expectations are so high. And a coach needs to be an amateur psychologist keeping the team motivated and playing together. But with a player like Kyle Singler, Murphy doesn’t have to look around for a lot of other options. Plus Singler models leadership with his intensity and style of play.

A case could be made for Ron Lampe of Sheldon. The Irish defeated No. 1-ranked South Medford late in the season and played the Panthers close in an earlier loss. The Irish were a preseason pick for third in the conference and Lampe’s team finished second with a 13-2 record. Its only two losses were to South Medford.

But my pick would go to North Medford’s Scott Plankenhorn, who was elevated from assistant to head coach this year. Plankenhorn wasn’t the North’s first choice, but he proved he was probably the best. Plankenhorn took a team with one outstanding player returning - sophomore Jordan Ellis - and got the Black Tornado into the state playoffs. He adjusted his tactics and made personnel moves throughout the campaign. North Medford seemed to improve as the season progressed and is probably playing its best ball now. Plankenhorn is firm, but the players respect his approach. I think Plankenhorn got more out of his talent than any other coach. That is how I judge who did the best coaching job.