Jeff Spevak, Writer

   Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? The 1962 classic film starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford got a big update on Saturday afternoon, the final day of the Rochester Fringe Festival.

Baby Jane, Baby Jane, at School of the Arts’ intimate Black Box Theater, used Davis and Crawford as a starting point. Here, it was Amy Canfield in Davis’ role as the former child star Baby Jane Hudson, in a house dress and floppy slippers. And Trish Annese in Crawford’s shoes – wheelchair, actually – as her sister Blanche.

“No one remembers me,” Baby Jane laments, as she pours herself another glass of gin. “Peter Pan, I could have played that part.”

“You’re too heavy,” Blanche replies. “They couldn’t have lifted you off the ground.”

It’s a combative relationship for the ages, and the aged. Blanche defines Baby Jane for us: “Your whole life is a delusion.”

And Baby Jane sums up their story: “We’re trapped with one another.”

“Dramatic tension,” Blanche say, “is our specialty.”

Dramatic tension was key to the film, and is in the play as well, written by Bradley Craddock. Baby Jane is a baby doll that has aged out of that role, But she won’t surrender to age, lamenting, “plastic never ages. I’d like to be made of plastic.”

When Craddock himself arrives, to take Baby Jane to an assisted living home, he assures Blanche, “We’ll make sure she is well taken care of.”

In New York City? Is Baby Jane Broadway bound at last? Even Baby Jane is more realistic than that.

“I was thinking,” she says, “Rochester, New York.”

A hit at the Dryden

Although these baseball enthusiasts failed to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn, their collection of baseball shorts presented at the George Eastman Museum’s Dryden Theater was otherwise a hit.

This was The Old Ball Game: Live-Scored Silent Baseball Films. Created by FUMBL: Formerly Unemployed Musicians Baseball League. A local group of musicians, created by Jared Engel, playing rootsy Americana music – a kazoo made an appearance! – celebrating films  depicting the roots of baseball.

Riffing on Booker T. & the M.G.’s “Green Onions,” the group accompanied original and archival films that included an ancient Disney animated film featuring a precursor of Mickey Mouse, and Day of the Catch, about the dropping a grapefruit from  an airplane, leading to the naming of Major League Baseball’s spring training camps, the Grapefruit League. And The Mascot Race, FUMBL’s new addition to the baseball genre, a competition between costumed baseball mascots. It was all very sweet.

 Jeff Spevak, a former sportswriter, a former arts writer, a former radio commentator, can be reached at jeffspevakwriter@gmail.com.

Leave it to our great comics to shed light on today’s greatest concerns: “Female reproductive organs are not as complicated as we make them out to be.”

That’s philosophy from Friday’s performance of Misery Loves Company, Friday at Blackfriars Theater. This show is the work of comic actors Joe Liss, who has played the Rochester Fringe Festival in the past, and is a familiar face from shows such as Curb Your Enthusiasm. And Dee Ryan, known for her work in shows such as The Office.

   Misery Loves Company returns Saturday afternoon, and the improv aspect of the show means it’s likely to run off in some different directions than the audiences have heard the last two days.

The sometimes sly, sometimes bold references throughout Misery Loves Company range from Dr. Oz to Stephen King; the latter, as in an infamous line from the film Misery, “I’m your No. 1 fan.” The jokes are meant to push buttons with abandon, including references to “an AI uterus” and “a five-star vagina.” And drinking urine. And, “You have some sort of menstrual behavior right now. It is correctly pointed out that the old children’s game Operation, in which you used tweezers to operate on a game-board patient, is based on a man’s organs.

In the clearest reference to its source material, Misery, Ryan is tied to a bed, a block of wood positioned between her feet, as Liss wields a hammer. “I saw misery every day,” Ryan says, “because I am a woman in America.”

 Jeff Spevak, a former sportswriter, a former arts writer, a former radio commentator, can be reached at jeffspevakwriter@gmail.com.

As this Shotspeare production of Shakespeare’s Othello itself warns

   “We can’t force you to drink,
   but it will make it better, we think.”

I can’t argue with that.

The chaos unfolding at the Spiegeltent, continuing through Saturday this week, is ostensibly Othello, and there are scraps of Shakespeare’s intentions throughout. Lines such as, “The beast with two backs,” Shakespeare’s own sly reference to sexual relations. And lots of characters die. Most of them. That’s very, very Shakespearean.

But in this production of Othello, much of that is overwhelmed by the hijinks of Matt Morgan and Heidi Brucker Morgan, yearly Rochester Fringe regulars who are also behind the Spiegeltent acrobatics of Cirque du Fringe: Anchors Away.

The company, a fixture at the Rochester Fringe, returns with its familiar Shakespearian gags, such as “The Wheel of Soliloquy,” which spins until it lands on instructions for the next action in the play, which is already far off course. Many of those actions rely on the actors drinking copious amounts of beer, including chugging beer through a funnel and plastic tube, like a college frat boy.

There are un-Bard-like gyrations by the actors, lots of codpiece adjustments, inflatable sharks and general chaos. Ping-pong balls cascade onto the stage, setting up a wild game of beer pong, in which the actors and the audience chase the ping-pong balls around the tent as they attempt to toss the balls into plastic beer cups.

The action is often played out to a non-Shakespearean soundtrack of Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie” and Ozzy Osbourne’s sinister call to get on board the “Crazy Train.”

Shotspeare continues throughout the remainder of the Fringe, through Saturday.

   Jeff Spevak, a former sportswriter, a former arts writer, a former radio commentator, can be reached at jeffspevakwriter@gmail.com.