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. 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.
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”.
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. 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. Like LaFrage, he speaks with an earnest tongue-in-cheek. 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.
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 inte
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