Slam Frank, a new hip-hop musical about Anne Frank, sounds like a bad joke. But if you listen to the conversations of those leaving the Orpheum Theater each night, it's clear this off-Broadway satire is one of the most proactive and important cultural commentaries of the decade.
After reading the viral 2022 tweet that dared to ask: "Did Anne Frank ever acknowledge her white privilege?", writer and composer Andrew Fox had an idea.
"What if like a progressive theater company gave Anne Frank the Hamilton treatment and just stripped all the characters of their Jewishness and made them whatever the fashionable marginalization of the moment is?" Fox told Newsweek. "I pictured it in my head, and I laughed a lot. And then I expected it to float away like every other dumb idea, but it didn't."
The idea stuck. Fox and his collaborators, including writer and childhood friend Joel Sinensky, began writing songs, posting clips online and building an audience that wasn't entirely sure whether Slam Frank was a real musical or an elaborate bit. But after table reads, a cast recording and a 2025 run at the Asylum NYC, the answer became unmistakably clear. The show officially opened in the East Village earlier this month.
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The production is a satirical "show within a show," depicting a troupe of actors attempting to modernize Anne Frank's story by reimagining the characters through contemporary identity politics. Anne becomes Anita Franco, a Mexican teenager. Otto Frank is portrayed as neurodivergent. Peter van Daan is nonbinary. Edith Frank is reduced to a theater director's concept of a "strong Black woman." Margot Frank, the only remaining Jewish character, is largely silent for much of the production.
Nothing is accidental; everything is intentional, down to the songs playing as the audience walks in and out of the theater, including "Thrift Shop" by Macklemore and "Gold Digger" by Kanye West.
It has elements of The Producers, Caberet, Dr. Strangelove and Book of Mormon, using shock and stereotypes that might surprise and, at times, offend, audiences to reveal greater truths and meaning.
The show's creators and cast insist the target is not Anne Frank, marginalized communities or diversity itself. Instead, they say the production lampoons artistic and institutional tendencies to reduce people to singular identities.
"When you create these really stringent ideas of what's right, what's wrong, that leads to dehumanization," writer Joel Sinesky said. "Our show is taking that idea and pushing it to the nth degree [to show how] right-meaning ideas can lead to this wholesale dehumanization of people.”
The parody is aimed at the fallout from what's known as Woke 1.0: The Obama-era optimism that brought us the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, same-sex marriage and Hamilton.
A decade later, that DEI decade of performative activism, tokenism and rigid cancel culture seems to many like an overcorrection. As New York City Councilman Chi Ossé put it, "woke 1 was crazy."
"The rules would keep changing, and we didn't know where they were coming from," Fox said. "The fun that we're having in Slam Frank is applying all these progressive storytelling rules in places where they either succeed beautifully [or] fail so spectacularly that it becomes a horror show."
Parodying the type of art that tries too hard to highlight a singular identity or swaps race or gender for a broad appeal – the type of work that ignores larger, more pressing problems and cycles back around the political spectrum to being regressive and offensive.
Olivia Bernabe, a non-binary Latine person playing an identity-bent Anne Frank, notes: "We should not have to diversify a Jewish narrative to make it more modern or more either palatable or digestible."
Much of the humor relies on dramatic irony. In one song, characters lament personal struggles with identity while hiding from Nazi persecution, singing "outside they're fighting a war, but in here, I'm fighting expectations."
"In that moment and in that song, I think what's so funny is that I'm really aggrandizing myself for this like self-realization," Alex Lewis, who plays Peter van Daan, said. "I don't think [the joke] comes from me coming out as non-binary. The joke is I've found this amazing realization within the context of [World War II]."
He adds that a lot of what the show does is, "bringing people together" and "getting people to come into a room [to] actually have real discussions about things."
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Mostly, Slam Frank is a poking fun at musical theater itself. Or, rather, how it's changed over the last decade to become preachy, prescriptive and void of all nuances.
"When I go to see shows, I immediately get turned off when I feel like something is being shoved down my throat," Rocky Paterra, who plays Otto Frank, said. "You want to feel like you're being trusted to receive the message without the message being explicitly stated."
In Slam Frank, the production literally projects "bad guy" on a screen behind the actors (*thunder crack* PATRIARCHY!) and uses exaggerated props to make sure you didn't miss the point they already sang about for 16 bars.
Preaching to the choir, or in this case, the audience, is not only lazy but counterintuitive to the purpose of theater. As Sinesky put it, if you want to tell people exactly what you believe and what they should think, be a politician. Art, he said, "is uniquely suited to explore the more ambiguous areas."
And with that ambiguity might come discomfort. Unlike watching a movie at home, audiences in a theater cannot pause or skip ahead. They are forced to sit in a communal space, experiencing the performance live through all the awkward or challenging moments.
"A lot of theater right now exists in a bubble or echo chamber of people wanting to feel good and not in any way uncomfortable," Paterra said. "But if that is the only art you're interested in seeing, it can be a bit unproductive. Some of the most needle-moving theater has been the most uncomfortable. And to be a part of a show right now that is not just making you laugh but causing that discomfort and questioning within the audience is really special."
It's the scolding "kindergarten morality" that Fox blames for turning people away from Broadway. Broadway is struggling – and revivals, stunt casting and charming IP is more likely to bring profits. While the pandemic and economic constraints have impacted theater attendance in recent years, Fox said talking down to or shunning audiences doesn't help get butts in seats.
"I don't know if you've seen sales over the last few years, [but] these people killed the theater and they blame they blame everybody else for it," Fox said.
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Fox and Sinesky's commitment to ambiguity in their message is the show's most compelling quality, as they remind us that existing in an echo chamber makes for bad politics as well as bad art.
"Once you're certain as an artist of your own beliefs and of the righteousness of them, you start writing crap," Fox said.
Throughout the show, the question of object truth, who is really good or evil and how over reliance on a single identity can persist through the well-written and well performed songs. The framing draw connections between the 1940s and today.
"In that World War Two era, it seemed very clear to everyone who was the good guy and who was the bad guys," Jaz Zepatos, who plays Mrs. Van Daan said. "Those lines are so blurred in our society today, and I think people so desperately want to know who to point the finger at, and it's not that simple anymore."
For a production built on one of the riskiest premises imaginable, Slam Frank ultimately asks a surprisingly serious question: What happens when ideology becomes more important than humanity? The answer is left unresolved, waiting in the conversations that spill onto Second Avenue after the lights come up.