Slam Frank: The Anne Frank rap musical that's dividing theater audiences

Andrew Fox was scrolling through Twitter in 2022 when he found a tweet arguing that Anne Frank had benefited from white privilege. The absurdity stuck with him. A composer and lyricist, Fox decided to build a musical around that ridiculous debate—a hip-hop show that would take the impulse to retrofit historical suffering through the lens of contemporary identity politics and see where the logic broke down. He reconnected with Joel Sinensky, a writer he'd known since school, and together they landed on a structure: a play within a play, where a well-meaning progressive theater company attempts to modernize Frank's story by casting her as a pansexual Latina, her mother as Black, her father as neurodivergent, and the family's hiding place in Amsterdam as an immigrant refuge. The result is Slam Frank, which premiered in a sold-out workshop run at the Asylum NYC comedy club in 2025 and opens off-Broadway proper at the Orpheum theatre on October 4.

The show arrived controversial before anyone had seen it. Fox and Sinensky had no interest in delivering a sermon. "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," Sinensky says, "and we wanted to write something that was a reaction to that." They borrowed Hamilton's visual language and rap sensibility—the logo itself echoes the blockbuster bio-musical—but pointedly rejected its clarity of purpose. The production's social media, managed by Fox, became a masterclass in misdirection. An Instagram post shared on Yom Kippur read: "Fasting is Fatphobic." Fox, who is Jewish, had committed early to never conveying "a specific viewpoint or message." The strategy worked. Reddit reviews labeled Fox and Sinensky as pro-Zionist, antisemitic, extremist right-wing, extremist left-wing—sometimes in the same thread. "That, to me, is one of the best indicators that we succeeded," Sinensky says, "that people can see it and love it or get angry for different reasons."

The show's irreverence extends to its physical staging. The entrance to the Orpheum's auditorium has been designed to resemble the bookcase that concealed the Frank family's hideout, with a neon sign reading "The Attic" welcoming audiences inside. Director Sam LaFrage, who previously made drag queen family theater downtown, speaks of the production as a corrective to his own "woke" past. "I get really excited by something that makes me feel like art is back," he says. "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." Walker Stovall, an actor in the ensemble, echoes the sentiment. "When Trump got elected, obviously that was awful, but I let woke get the best of me," he says. "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 sees the show as a portrait of how progressive discourse has become detached from human connection. Many characters speak in nearly incomprehensible jargon—at one point, someone asks "through what assemblage of counter-hegemonic labor shall the scaffolding of our interlocking systems of oppression be rendered obsolete?" It's a parody of a real mode of speech, one that Fox believes has made culture "less human and more abstract." The show was once rejected from a BMI music workshop, Fox says, specifically because of a non-binary coming-out song—despite the fact that no non-binary people were in the room that year. The next year, after new non-binary members joined, the same song became their favorite in the show. Olivia Bernábe, the non-binary actor playing Anita, discovered the musical through Fox's TikTok videos and thought it was "just an intense commit-to-the-bit, but with really good music." They find the number "hysterical." "I know that there are people who do get offended," Bernábe says. "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."

Reviews have been largely positive. Ben Brantley, the former New York Times theater critic, called it "may be the most important new show around." Patti LuPone visited the workshop and came backstage moved. Yet the final twenty minutes remain the most contentious. A plot twist widens the show's scope from historical satire to what Fox calls "contemporary excoriation." Stovall initially resisted. "My gut instinct was, 'Don't do this to my girls,'" he says, half joking. But he came to see its necessity. "The reason I had a problem with it is why I think it's important to put it onstage, right?"

Fox believes the culture has shifted. He paraphrases Rick Rubin's observation that ideas float in the air waiting for someone to grab them. "There are many things in the culture reflective of things that Slam Frank is doing," he says, "so it's clearly something in the air." He's received emails accusing him of making people stop taking the Holocaust seriously. His response: people were already moving in that direction. "I've been talking to people for the last three years; they were ready to not take it seriously anymore." Whether that readiness reflects genuine cultural change or something more troubling remains the question the show leaves hanging.