It’s difficult to not invoke the term “woke” when discussing Slam Frank, the 2025 musical that reimagines Anne Frank as a pansexual Latina. Controversial even before its first performance, it giddily satirizes identity politics through its show-within-a-show structure, in which a progressive theatre company attempts to modernize the Holocaust victim’s story by paralleling it to the struggles faced by marginalized people today. Here, the mother of “Anita” is Black, her father is neurodivergent and, while hiding in Amsterdam, they are very much immigrants.
Creator Andrew Fox recognizes “a temptation to categorize it as anti-woke art”, but points readily at the show’s fans and detractors, who fall across every conceivable party line, and cautions against one-note interpretations. “I think the piece is just trying to grapple with the last 15 years of cultural and intellectual upheaval and get some comedy out of it.”
Following last year’s sold-out run at the Asylum NYC comedy club (now retroactively referred to as a workshop), it will premiere off-Broadway proper at the Orpheum theatre on 4 October.
The idea started online, if you can believe it, when Fox stumbled across a 2022 tweet dissecting Frank’s alleged white privilege. The composer-lyricist got to work on a hip-hop musical inspired by that absurd debate, and reconnected with an old school friend, writer Joel Sinensky, who suggested they implement the backstage concept. (Before then, Fox says, “it was closer to Oleanna than to Waiting for Guffman.”)
“We have many things that we disagree on, but the thing that we were always very united on is this feeling that we were tired of didactic theater,” Sinensky says. “A lot of the work that’s been made commercially in the last decade has been very direct about what you’re supposed to take away from it, and we wanted to write something that was a reaction to that – that was about that.”
So while the current sociopolitical moment (post-#MeToo, post-Covid, post-“Woke 1.0”) is certainly a target in the musical’s line of fire, its form lampoons the art that has resulted from that zeitgeist. Hamilton is a major inspiration – if that’s the word – with Slam Frank’s logo riffing on the blockbuster bio-musical’s own, and its musical sensibility imitates its verbose, sloganeering rap.
What it doesn’t borrow from Hamilton, purposefully, is a clear ideology. The production’s social media, managed by Fox, has been a masterclass in subterfuge and trolling. (“Fasting is Fatphobic,” reads an Instagram post shared on Yom Kippur.) Fox, who is Jewish, says one of their guiding intentions was to never convey “a specific viewpoint or message”.
“We committed pretty early to making something that, anytime we feel like we’re making one point and it’s starting to feel like a lecture, we swing in another direction,” he says. “It lets us focus on making the piece as effective as possible at getting reactions, getting laughs, getting shock.”
Sinensky says he revels in Reddit reviews of the show, which alternately label him and Fox as pro-Zionist, antisemitic, extremist right- and leftwing: “That, to me, is one of the best indicators that we succeeded – that people can see it and love it or get angry for different reasons.”
Online chatter aside, reviews have been largely positive. The show’s publicist (understandably) makes the most out of an X post by Ben Brantley, the former New York Times theater critic, arguing that it “may be the most important new show around”. Its director, Sam LaFrage, recalls a visit from Patti LuPone, who he says came backstage at Asylum NYC to mention how moved she’d been.
“I get really excited by something that makes me feel like art is back,” says LaFrage. “Like, we can do plays that make people uncomfortable, and say the things that have been left unsaid because we’ve been worried about getting canceled, you know? The play within the play is a great container to exercise that right, to be artists. Slam Frank is about what’s happened to art.”
Like Fox and Sinensky, LaFrage feels the musical is a way to poke fun at his own “woke” past, something he thinks also legitimizes the honesty of its satirical intent. “I used to do drag queen family theater downtown,” he says with a mix of pride and chagrin.
“When Trump got elected, obviously that was awful, but I let woke get the best of me,” says Walker Stovall, who plays a character modeled after the camera operators in big-budget Jamie Lloyd productions. Like LaFrage, he speaks with an earnest tongue-in-cheek. “You should be critical about the way you think and about what you’re taught, but I think when I was letting it get in the way of connecting with other people is when it all went bad.”
Fox echoes the sentiment that respectability politics have served an opposite effect. Many of the characters in Slam Frank often get bogged down in well-meaning, barely intelligible jargon. (At one point, someone wonders “through what assemblage of counter-hegemonic labor shall the scaffolding of our interlocking systems of oppression be rendered obsolete?”)
“It’s a very strange way of speaking and writing that kind of detaches people from their own thoughts,” he says. “Part of what our show tries to do is represent that experience of being part of a culture that is becoming less human and more abstract, and how funny or horrifying that can be.”
Ironically, the musical was previously ejected from a highbrow workshop hosted by BMI, the music licensing organization, for that un-abstracted bravado. According to Fox, “what got it kicked out was the non-binary coming out song, and as far as I know, there wasn’t a single non-binary person in that room. Then the next year, a bunch of new non-binary people joined the workshop and that was their favorite song in the show.”
Olivia Bernábe, the non-binary actor who plays Anita, says they find the number “hysterical”. They first learned of the show through Fox’s TikTok videos, and thought it was “just an intense commit-to-the-bit, but with really good music”.
“I know that there are people who do get offended,” says Bernábe. “There have been a couple of times where people have walked out; I don’t know if they forget that it’s satire, or it could be that everyone has a different threshold for it. We are teasing, but not actually making fun of the identity. What the show plays with is the idea of your identity equaling your ethics, because that’s just not true.”
There’s plenty of button-pushing atop that righteous jestering: the entrance to the Orpheum’s auditorium, for example, has been made to look like the bookcase which led to the Frank family’s hideout, with a neon sign welcoming visitors to “The Attic”. But Fox thinks “the culture was ready to move in this direction” of irreverence, paraphrasing a quote from Rick Rubin, the famous record producer, “that ideas are in the air and that somebody’s gonna get them. If you don’t go forward with it, that idea doesn’t die with you.”
“There are many things in the culture reflective of things that Slam Frank is doing, so it’s clearly something in the air,” he says. “There’s certainly questions about the manipulation of the sanctity of the Holocaust in the popular imagination. I’ve gotten some emails that are like, ‘People don’t take this topic seriously anymore because of you,’ and I’m like, ‘I’ve been talking to people for the last three years; they were ready to not take it seriously anymore.’”
Slam Frank’s final 20 minutes, set off by a truly audacious plot twist, are its most controversial, widening its scope from historical satire to contemporary excoriation. It was the only aspect to give Stovall any misgivings, before he recognized its value.
“My gut instinct was, ‘Don’t do this to my girls,’” he says, half joking. “I had to think about it and be like, ‘Why do I have a problem with this? I don’t actually have a problem with this. This is hilarious.’ And the reason I had a problem with it is why I think it’s important to put it onstage, right?”
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Slam Frank is at the Orpheum theatre, New York, until 30 November
