‘Stone Soup’ short and sweet at Orange Coast

There aren’t many ingredients in Orange Coast College’s children’s

production of “Stone Soup,” but the end result may prove filling for

youngsters later in life.

The short play, written by David Scaglione and directed by Rick

Golson, both OCC drama department faculty members, carries a message

particularly significant in today’s suspicious times.

“Stone Soup” is a morality playlet set in a poor Prussian village

of yesteryear, where inhabitants are wary of anything unfamiliar and

especially frightened of strangers. Imagine their consternation,

then, when three soldiers -- tired and, most particularly, hungry --

arrive in their midst.

All this in a little over a half hour. But OCC’s enthusiastic and

imaginative entertainers manage to reach their pint-sized audience

and, perhaps, impart a message.

Brian Munce cleverly enacts the more prescient of the three

soldiers, with Andrew Vonderschmitt and Justin Chambers completing

the trio on a more basic level. Laura Viramontes as the mayor and

Frank Miyashiro as the butcher fill their assignments well, but it’s

the animated Heather Leanna as the town crier who walks off with a

good chunk of the show.

This weekend, as “Stone Soup” completes its run in the large

Robert B. Moore Theater, OCC’s spotlight shifts to the Studio

Theater, where student directors will put their work on display in

the college’s summer one-act play festival.

The students, members of the OCC Repertory Company, will offer a

wide variety of short plays, both original and published. The

one-acts will be staged Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 and 8

p.m. through July 28, and tickets may be ordered by calling (714)

432-5640, ext. 1.

No sooner will the one-acts be on stage than the college will

mount a pair of highly abridged Shakespearean works under the

collective title of “Supersonic Shakespeare.”

The Bard’s “Comedy of Errors” will be performed in an abbreviated

45-minute version, while the post-intermission attraction will be a

return production of Tom Stoppard’s “The 15-minute Hamlet.”

Both shows have been offered at OCC in the recent past, but “The

Comedy of Errors” has been sliced and diced into a much-shorter

format, sort of the same treatment Stoppard rendered on Shakespeare’s

most celebrated tragedy.