Review: In Slam Frank, Anne Frank Gets the Hamilton Treatment

Did Anne Frank ever acknowledge her white privilege? This is a real question that was asked on Twitter in 2022, back when America’s educated class spent an inordinate amount of time sniping about identity on social media while shirking work-from-home responsibilities. Of course, that behavior is all behind us now …

But the artistic fruits of America’s abortive cultural revolution are just now ripening. A particularly delicious example is Slam Frank, a new musical by Andrew Fox (score) and Joel Sinensky (book) that reimagines the bestselling diarist as a queer Latinx girl hiding with her family from the Nazis. But more significantly, they’re all hiding from their authentic selves.

The creators have been edging audiences on Instagram for months, but this is no Internet prank. It’s a real musical playing at AsylumNYC, sharing that space with Exorcistic: The Rock Musical. A blistering satire of progressive, terminally online sensibilities, Slam Frank is the edgiest musical playing in New York right now.

We understand that from the curtain speech, delivered by the alleged director (the effortlessly pompous John Anker Bow, who also takes on the role of Hermann Van Daan). It includes a land acknowledgement, a strange Australian custom that was adopted as a pre-show benediction by several not-for-profit theaters in the 2021-22 season but has now mostly been banished to a reservation in the digital program. “We are currently residing and performing upon the sacred ancestral grounds of the …,” he says, rifling through his pockets for a cheat sheet that never materializes, “Okay, well, whoever they are, they were here first, and we are here now, and shame on us.”

Slam Frank is a play-within-a-play that depicts a troupe of wokesters taking it upon themselves to inject some diversity into the Frank family story, with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability taking center stage. Apparently, that sounds a lot like the work of Lin-Manuel Miranda:

“It’s time for a short review:
I’m a Jewish girl boss here in World War II
Authoritarian Aryans listen up, let me cook:
My story’s gonna leave you shook, better buy my book!”

Olivia Bernábe spits these rhymes with immaculate flow and spunky kid-sister energy in the title role. She’s Anita Franco, the youngest daughter of neurodivergent immigrant Otto (Rocky Paterra, squeezing laughs out of every line) and proud Black woman Edith (Austen Horne seems to be channeling Viola Davis, Taraji P. Henson, and Mo’Nique all at once). When a CIA coup brought the Nazis to power, they escaped the barrio of Frankfurt and crossed the border into Holland where they thought they would be safe.

They will wait out the war in hiding in a secret annex above Otto’s office with Mr. and Mrs. Van Daan (Jaz Zepatos with razor-sharp comic timing) and their teenage son Peter (Alex Lewis, amping up the angst to 11). He’s far more interesting to Anne than her own big sister Margot (Anya Van Hoogstraten, delivering both the quietest and most shocking performance in the show), who spends all day silently reading the Torah.

Anne especially bonds with Peter during the number “Fighting Expectations,” which sounds like a Pasek & Paul trunk song and features the memorable lyric, “Yeah, the Nazis are mean, and they kill you for reals, / But I never feel seen, so I get in my feels.”

Whether it’s Mrs. Van Daan’s journey with third-wave feminism or Anne’s struggle to honor her Latin heritage while also managing to “appeal to a mainstream, four-quadrant audience, without alienating white men aged 18-34,” personal struggles with identity take precedence over the actual World War happening just outside. It’s the most stinging allegory I’ve yet encountered for a prestige culture that consistently misses the forest for the trees. And it’s hilarious, producing the kind of satisfying laughter that can only come from engaging in the forbidden.

Fox’s hummable pastiche score and Sinensky’s sidesplitting book are further enhanced by Sam Lafrage’s resourceful direction, which is chock-full of sight gags sending up the work of Michael Greif, Julie Taymor, Ivo Van Hove, and Jamie Lloyd. Walker Stovall seems to be having a ball shooting the live video, which is incorporated into Zack Lobel’s authentically aggressive projection design. Scenic designer CJ Howard makes the most of limited space, and Sarah Lockwood’s clever costumes offer their own provocations, like when the yellow star patches are refashioned in rainbow.

The LGBTQIA+ movement, intersectionality, straight white men—no subject or identity group is safe from Fox and Sinensky, who gleefully aim spitballs at conventions and contradictions that have long gone unquestioned in the New York theater. Ironically, a late number titled “Safe Space” (but which I have been referring to as “Margot’s Turn”) is bound to prove the most controversial. But is it even worth doing a show like this if you don’t get the occasional walkout? This is the closest thing off-Broadway has to an episode of South Park.

And it is telling that Slam Frank is being presented on this particular stage, at an improv comedy theater, and not at any of New York’s prestigious not-for-profits. It has nothing to do with quality. The music and lyrics in Slam Frank are better than a lot of what I’ve encountered in new off-Broadway musicals. Rather, it’s because institutional theaters are still in thrall to outdated manners and governed by a fear of transgressing them. If they are ever to be relevant in the American conversation again, they ought to get over that right now.

So if you love the theater and want it to once again be a safe space for dangerous thought, the best thing you can do is buy a ticket to Slam Frank and laugh your ass off. I promise, it won’t be difficult.