Slam Frank

Slam Frank is a one-act musical comedy that makes Anne Frank's story the raw material for satire. The frame is a theater company's opening night: a self-consciously progressive troupe is premiering its own adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, and the audience watches that performance. In the company's telling, the diarist is Anita Franco, a queer Latina who raps.

The show says its satire is aimed at identity politics and at the musicals that try to profit from it. Andrew Fox wrote the music and lyrics, Joel Sinensky wrote the book, and the two conceived the show together. The Orpheum Theatre production is a limited engagement and a return for a show first staged in 2025. The billed producers include GFour Productions and Stage Time.

The evening opens before the story does. An Artistic Director gives a curtain speech that includes a land acknowledgement, then explains that an actress left late in rehearsals, so one ensemble member now has two parts. That doubling is part of the staging: one actor plays both Margot and Abuela, and another plays both the Artistic Director and Mr. Van Daan.

The play itself is set in the secret annex above Otto's office in Amsterdam, in the years 1942 to 1944. The company has reimagined the family. Otto is a neurodivergent immigrant, Edith is a proud Black woman, and Margot is a near-silent, religiously observant older sister. Early on, the ghost of Anita's abuela, her grandmother, urges her to write, and the journal begins.

Then the Van Daans move in: a chauvinist Mr. Van Daan, his meek wife and their son Peter, a non-binary dancer who catches Anita's attention. Edith answers Mr. Van Daan with Black feminist slam poetry. A radio broadcast about publishing diaries written in wartime sends Anita back to her pages to rewrite them, and she learns that being published would mean hiding her Latinx identity.

Arguments about who each person is take up so much room that the war outside the annex barely registers. At one point the residents come out in new identities, and the yellow stars on their clothes give way to pronoun pins.

Fox also made the arrangements. The score moves between musical comedy and rap, and it is full of references to Broadway musicals; the show's logo echoes that of Hamilton, with the central figure standing on a Star of David. Fox's influences include Wilson Phillips and Kanye West, as well as Stephen Sondheim, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jason Robert Brown. Alex Harrington is the music director.

The song list gives a sense of the show's targets. Titles such as "Write It All Out" and "Rewrite My Diary" (which returns in two reprises) follow Anita's journal, while "Immigrant Girl," "Yeast of Edith," "Herstory," "Non-Binary," "Allies" and "Justice" put the other characters and the company's causes on stage. The page lists the full set.

An original cast recording has 14 tracks and features the 2025 cast. Mikhail Pivovarov co-produced it with Fox, who also arranged and orchestrated it. Two numbers, "Safe Space" and "Anita's Decision," are not on it.

The Assistant Stage Manager is a character who shoots live video that feeds the projections, so the show's technology is part of the fiction.

The Orpheum has 299 seats. Asylum NYC, where the show started, is a performance space of about 150 seats. The larger stage allows a fuller physical production. A single song was swapped out after the Asylum NYC run, and the creators' rewrites for this version aim to bring the show's underlying themes further forward. Sinensky has said the last 20 minutes were the hardest part to write and are now his favorite.

As of October 2026, Olivia Bernábe leads the Orpheum company as Anita. Alex Lewis plays Peter, Rocky Paterra is Otto and Austen Horne is Edith. Jaz Zepatos takes Mrs. Van Daan, Amelia Louise Barr takes both Margot and Abuela, and John Anker Bow doubles as the Artistic Director and Mr. Van Daan. Walker Stovall plays the Assistant Stage Manager. Lewis, best known for the comedy band Lewberger, is also one of the producers. Most of the 2025 cast returned, and Barr is new to the company.

The spark was a Twitter thread from 2022 that went viral by wondering aloud if Anne Frank ever reckoned with her white privilege. Jewish organizations broadly condemned those first posts. From there it took about a year to reach a first private table read, six more months to a public concert and two more to the world premiere.

A concert presentation took place on June 16, 2025, at Asylum NYC, an improv comedy theater in Manhattan; another musical, Exorcistic: The Rock Musical, ran in the same space. The fully staged developmental run began there on September 17, 2025, directed by LaFrage. It was first announced for three weeks, then extended several times and sold out. Before the opening, opinion pieces in Jewish newspapers criticized the project, and an online petition against it stopped at 787 signatures. Fox himself stepped into the roles of the Director and Mr. Van Daan in the final weeks, and the run ended on December 28, 2025.

A golden-age-style number for the male antagonist was cut midway through that run. In September 2026, the production released a music video of it sung by Richard Kind. The cast recording had its own path: a crowdfunding campaign was announced in January 2026, backers received the album in May 2026, and a download went on sale on the show's website on July 7, 2026.

The Orpheum engagement was announced on June 12, 2026, and the producers said they hoped it would lead to a Broadway transfer. Previews began on September 17, 2026, a year to the day after the 2025 run started, and the official opening night was October 4, 2026.