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 theatre-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 Frank’s 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, with 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 they 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, “Because 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 discovered that he is monetizing and appropriating Jain & Hindu symbols.” Just about every day, when people wondered if it was all a put-on, Fox responded with a joke that turned out not to be a joke after all, and which turned into a kind of mission statement: “ ‘Slam Frank’ is a real musical.”
On a recent Wednesday night, a line of cheerful theatregoers stretched down Twenty-fourth Street, waiting to be inspected by a guard with a handheld metal detector. As far as Fox knows, the security protocol has not yet foiled any planned incidents of violence, but a guard did once tell Fox, who also plays a role in the musical, that his own performance could use a bit more “heart.” (Fox decided that he agreed, and tweaked his approach accordingly.) Onstage and off, Fox is a restless and voluble presence, the kind of guy who seems to be pacing back and forth even when he is sitting still. Aside from the guard’s performance note, the reaction to “Slam Frank” has been generally positive—surprisingly so, perhaps, given Fox’s evident desire to annoy just about everyone. The New York Times described the show as “clever” and “gleefully provocative”; the London Times called it “the most brilliant new musical in New York City,” and voiced a hope that it could “save Broadway.” The bad reviews helped, too: Fox News called it “grotesque,” and someone started an online petition that labelled the production “deeply offensive” and demanded that it be cancelled; the petition provided a useful suggestion of controversy, even though fewer than a thousand people signed it. “Slam Frank” was originally booked for three weeks, which turned into four months; it is now scheduled to run through December 28th. In the lobby before the show, people could buy drinks and merchandise, including a “PROBLEM ATTIC” baseball cap and a “Slam Frank” yarmulke, which had required an expedition to a Judaica shop in Borough Park, Brooklyn. “I want the ‘Slam Frank’ yarmulke to be the single best yarmulke anybody’s ever owned,” Fox told me, sounding a bit like the bumptious artistic director of a regional theatre company—which is, in fact, the role that Fox was playing in the show.
This character was Fox’s major concession to respectability. Joel Sinensky, a screenwriter and playwright, and a childhood friend of Fox’s, wrote the book, and they agreed that “Slam Frank” should be a meta-musical. It opens with a memorably pretentious speech from an artistic director who is also a scapegoat; audiences can blame the character, not the creators, for anything that offends them. (Mel Brooks did something similar in “The Producers,” which had a plot that gave viewers license to laugh at “Springtime for Hitler,” the gloriously misguided mini-musical at the heart of the show.) Even so, Fox knew that he didn’t want to rely on easy punch lines about safe spaces and trigger warnings. “The last good trigger-warning joke was made in, like, 2017,” he told me. He wanted audiences to be carried away, despite themselves, by the sight and sound of the attic-bound characters singing, “Outside, they’re fighting a war / But, in here, we’re fighting expectations!” That meant making sure that the songs didn’t play merely as jokes. “If I’m writing this big queer anthem, I need the first three minutes of it, at least—before it goes off the rails—to be something that a bunch of queer teen-agers would want to perform in their college theatre program,” Fox says.
