One-Acts Come Up Short : But Stages’ two world-premiere romps are well performed and fun.

“Here come da Judge! Here come da Judge!” That’s a loud echo from those courtroom romps that were a staple of burlesque comedy decades ago. The opening scene of Thomas Corsaut’s “Big Red Shoe Diaries,” one of two world premiere one-acts at Stages, is an echo of the same source, but its sound is muffled.

There is an irascible Judge (Angela Brau) angrily banging a gavel, two outlandish attorneys (Steve Everett, Michael M. Miller) and two idiotic clients. Judy (Amy Tan) is suing her husband, Marvin, for nonsupport.

Marvin gave up a perfectly good job to go to clown school and, in fact, is always in clown costume. Naturally, Judy had to make a living, so she went to belly-dancing school. It’s a ripe setup for an absurdist theater piece.

Corsaut makes the mistake of never taking any of this as far as he could, and he further complicates things by adding a comic psychiatrist who wanted to be a train engineer (Eddie Majalca) and Marvin’s loony clown coach, Sergeant Chuckles (Mike Brainard), who learned how to be funny in Vietnam.

Too much of a good thing makes “Diaries” look like the rough draft of a very good play that needs to be simplified to really work well.

This is most obvious near the end, when Marvin’s hero comes to the clown school to offer him a quick step to success. This is Bobo the Great (Roger Freeman), who steals the show from everyone else as a kinky and kooky sight gag who could read the phone book and still be hilarious.

All the performances are solid, particularly Majalca’s twisted therapist, but it’s Bobo’s bash all the way, in a valiant attempt at absurdism that needs better structuring to fit into the genre.

The second, and stronger, piece is David Amitin’s “There’s Always Room for Pie,” a title that’s way too cute for the play.

A four-girl singing group is discovered by a dazzle-minded entrepreneur, who throws in his ditzy niece to make it five, and calls them the “Pie Girls.” There’s Apple, and Pumpkin, and the smart one, Sigma Pi, etc. Guess where this idea came from?

It’s a play that won’t be done after the Spice Girls have passed their 15 minutes of fame, but here again, there’s a germ of a strong short piece inside this chronicle play that follows the girls from their beginning to their eventual breakup.

If all of the action took place in the dressing room at their final concert, Amitin would have a chance to dig into their characters more deeply and paint a group portrait of five disparate young women and the effect too much success has had on them. As it is, it looks like just an opportunity to get some scantily clad girls on stage without looking too much at what makes them tick.

Under the author’s energetic direction, the performances are strong. Jena Minnick Harry, Lisa Layne Griffiths, Tees Cooper, Melanie Baker and Amy Glinskas present five distinct personalities; with deeper insight into their inner worlds, their performances and the play would throb more strongly. Adam Clark is also very strong as their sleazy manager, but, again, Amitin has depended too much on a simplistic stereotype and not given Clark a real person to build on.

BE THERE

“Big Red Shoe Diaries” & “There’s Always Room for Pie,” Stages, 1188 N. Fountain Way, Suite E&F;, Anaheim. 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday. (714) 630-3059. Ends Oct 7. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.