Read the logline and your first instinct is to reach for the fainting couch. A hip-hop musical that reimagines Anne Frank’s diary through, and I am quoting the show’s own gleefully absurd sales copy, an “intersectional, multiethnic, genderqueer, decolonized, anti-capitalist, hyper-empowering Afro-Latin” lens. If that sentence makes you wince, congratulations, you have correctly identified the trap it is setting. Because Slam Frank, which opens Off-Broadway at the Orpheum this fall, is not actually laughing at Anne Frank. It is laughing at the exact reflex that made you wince, and at an entire theatrical culture’s compulsion to run every sacred text through the same identity-first blender.
Here is the news, a beat behind the point. Slam Frank begins previews September 17 and opens October 4 at the Orpheum Theatre in the East Village, running through November 30. It arrives having already become one of the most argued-about pieces of theater in the country during a sold-out developmental run last year.
Now here is the fact that reframes the entire thing, the one the outrage-farming version of this story always leaves out. The show is a play within a play. Its actual subject is a progressive community theater company that decides to “fix” The Diary of Anne Frank for modern audiences, and the comedy comes from watching their good intentions metastasize into something monstrous, sanding a murdered child’s testimony down into a hashtag-ready spectacle. Anne becomes Anita, a Latina who writes her diary in Spanish. The joke is not on her. The joke is on the people who could not resist rewriting her. And crucially, both of the men who made it, composer Andrew Fox and book writer Joel Sinensky, are Jewish. This is not outsiders desecrating a Holocaust icon. This is Jewish satire, working the same nervy territory Mel Brooks mined when he put “Springtime for Hitler” on a Broadway stage and dared you to laugh.
That distinction matters, and it matters most because of what is underneath the jokes. Anne Frank was a real girl who hid in an Amsterdam annex for two years and died in Bergen-Belsen at fifteen. Her diary is not a property, it is close to scripture. A satire that plants its flag on that ground is playing with live ammunition, and there is a version of this premise that would be simply grotesque. The only thing separating brave from vile here is execution, whether the offense is doing real critical work or just cashing in on shock. That is precisely the test we apply on this site to the gnarliest Troma provocations, where the best of them, like Shakespeare’s Shitstorm, earn their bad taste by turning it into actual argument, and the worst just wallow in it. The question with Slam Frank is the same one. Does it think, or does it only shock?
The most telling answer came from the strangest direction. The theatrical establishment that Slam Frank spends two hours skewering did not clutch its pearls and demand the show be shut down. It handed the thing a bouquet. One of the most influential critics of the last generation called it the most important show around. A prominent year-end roundup, published by the very kind of institution the musical lampoons, crowned it the funniest spoof of the left of its year. A Jewish theater publication ran a rave. That is a genuinely surprising outcome, and it is the real story here. When the target of a satire laughs hardest, it usually means one of two things: either the satire is toothless, or it is so precise that even its victims have to concede the hit. By every account, Slam Frank is the second kind.
I have not seen it, so I am not filing a verdict, and I will be honest that a premise like this could still land wrong for plenty of people no matter how deftly it is built. Some will walk out feeling the theater finally found the nerve to laugh at its own orthodoxies. Others will feel that no amount of cleverness justifies staging a quinceañera anywhere near Anne Frank, and that is not an unreasonable place to land either. Satire this hot does not owe you comfort, and it does not get to demand your approval. What it can claim, and what the reception backs up, is that it has gotten a very large number of very different people to argue about the same thing in the same room, which used to be the entire point of going to the theater in the first place.
Here is the practical rundown, kept in one place. Slam Frank runs at the Orpheum Theatre at 126 Second Avenue in Manhattan, in previews from September 17, opening October 4, and playing through November 30, with performances most nights of the week and matinees on weekends. It runs a tight 110 minutes with no room to catch your breath, which is probably the correct length for something this combustible. Tickets run from $50 to $140, and you can get them at the show’s official site. The returning cast is led by Olivia Bernábe as Anita, with Alex Lewis, Austen Horne, Rocky Paterra, and the rest of the developmental ensemble, plus Amelia Louise Barr making her debut as Margot.
So here is my flag in the ground, and I am planting it carefully. I do not know if Slam Frank is brilliant or if it is a bridge too far, and I suspect the honest answer is that it will be both, depending entirely on who is sitting in the seat. But I know that a satire made by Jewish writers, aimed at a culture’s habit of flattening everything it touches into the same shape, and then embraced by the very establishment it targets, is a far more interesting object than the shock-value headline suggests. Go in ready to argue with it. That, for once, appears to be exactly what it wants.
