Thankfully, Slam Frank does have a point beyond mere provocation. The framing device of the musical is that we’re watching a community theater reimagine the story of Frank, citing her status as an immigrant as the reason for making her Latinx. The show quickly sets its tone with a land acknowledgement from an “artistic director” (John Anker Bow) who promptly forgets whose land it is that he’s acknowledging. Slam Frank, which was inspired by a viral 2022 tweet calling Anne Frank a “perfect example of white privilege,” is very obviously disdainful of these performatively progressive identitarian politics. Over the course of the show, virtually every single character in the attic comes out as some LGBTQ+ identity. Anne’s mother Edith (Austen Horne) is played by a Black woman; her father Otto (Rocky Panterra) is neurodiverse. Mr. van Daan (also Bow), the show’s sole straight white man, is literally presented in a worse light than Hitler.
It’s pretty funny, even if the target—self-important theater artists who believe that pandering to Democratic sensibilities without questioning any underlying system has the power to stop real world atrocities—is a bit easy. Hamilton was criticized from the beginning for recasting the Founding Fathers without truly questioning the foundational myths of the U.S., with only passing mentions to slavery. There is legitimate debate to be had about whether that’s a period of history that we should feel good about. In Slam Frank, this point is made most clearly in a song where the less-than-masculine Peter (Alex Lewis) sings about how outside they’re fighting a war, but inside, they’re fighting expectations. At one point, Edith performs a slam poem that features the phrase “every woman is a Jew”—never mind that they’re in hiding because of an actual genocide targeting Jews.
These types of jokes make up roughly the first 60% of the show, and it does feel like Slam Frank spins its wheels at a couple points. But then it really starts cooking. It’s impossible to talk in detail about the final portion of the show without ruining the experience for anyone who wants to see it—and I’ve been asked not to—but let’s just say there’s a certain geopolitical elephant in the room. The way Slam Frank chooses to address it is quite possibly the most shocking thing I’ve ever seen in a New York theater. It’s dangerous in a thrilling way because you’re not totally sure if they’re going to be able to land this plane. And, sure, Slam Frank is not able to comprehensively answer political questions that have existed for most of a century. But it has a genuinely courageous willingness to go there and to sit in the discomfort that is fairly unusual for a medium that lives on applause. The final tableau before the curtain is Cabaret-level disturbing.
The reason that Slam Frank succeeds in this territory is because its real target is not politics—though it’s not shy on that front—but performance and theater itself. The show, written by composer Andrew Fox and librettist Joel Sinensky, has contempt for contemporary commercial theater that clearly comes from a place of deep respect for the form. There’s a realism, or perhaps a pessimism, in the denouement about theater’s ability to affect change. It’s a medium that’s constrained by geography and prohibitively expensive for large swaths of people. But given just how confrontational the show gets, Fox and Sinensky clearly still think it’s worth trying. Slam Frank probably won’t change the world. Maybe it’ll change theater, and maybe it won’t. But I can’t think of anything else I’ve seen on stage this year that has occupied so much of my mental space after I left the room.
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