A few years ago, Andrew Fox was struck by a transcendently bad idea. He would turn the story of Anne Frank into a satirical hip-hop musical: intersectional,inclusive,and inane. Fox was a theater-loving composer who had grown dispirited by the industry in general, and by humorless and preachy productions in particular.His gloomy outlook was not improved by his habit of spending hours on social media, which is where, in 2022, he came across a debate over whether or not Anne frank was the beneficiary of “white privilege”-notwithstanding her Jewish identity, for which she was hunted down by Nazi soldiers and shipped to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died, in 1945, at the age of fifteen. Like many viral online debates, this one was rather one-sided: most people seemed to agree that the idea was ridiculous, including the celebrity-gossip site TMZ, which covered the controversy and rendered its own dismissive verdict in the form of a woozy-face emoji.
Even so, Fox couldn’t shake the thought of a show that tried to update FrankS story for modern political sensitivities. He wrote a rap, heavily indebted to Eminem’s “8 Mile,” in the voice of a feisty teen-ager whose hip-hop bravado has been dampened only slightly by the fact that she and her family happen to be crammed into an attic, hoping not to be discovered and killed: “When this hiding’s over, I’ll be in demand, wiht my prose tighter / And if survival’s not the plan, I’ll be a ghost writer.” He decided that his Anne Frank would not be white but rather Latina, having grown up in “the barrios of Frankfurt,” with a closeted father who loves to remind people that he is neurodivergent; she has a crush on Peter, a fellow-refugee whose gender identity is the subject of an inspirational acoustic-guitar ballad called “Non-Binary.” Fox kept writing songs and began to enlist collaborators, all of whom had to decide whether thay wanted to risk their careers by signing on.One actor sent the script to his manager and got a note back warning that the show “could end up feeling more like a satire of progressive theater than an actual reimagining of Anne Frank’s story.” The manager was not at all wrong,but the actor committed to the show anyway.
In defiance of cautious theatre professionals-and, perhaps, of common sense-“Slam Frank” lurched to life. Fox arranged a top-secret table read, booked under a pseudonym, in order to limit the blowback if people hated it. He staged a one-off performance and then, in September, “Slam Frank” began a developmental run at Asylum NYC, a comedy theatre on East Twenty-fourth Street, which has a hundred and fifty seats surrounding a small stage. For months, Fox had been building a following on social media by posting a series of deadpan updates on Instagram and TikTok, from a dedicated “Slam Frank” account. When one user asked why on earth Anne Frank would speak Spanish, Fox wrote, with mock exasperation, “As she’s an immigrant?” When another noted that one of the songs sounded a bit like Kanye West, who had recently added to his infamy by promoting a website that sold swastika T-shirts, Fox replied, “Unfortunately we wrote this song BEFORE we discov