Deep in an Irony Spiral, Slam Frank Struggles to Show Its Center

Your reaction to the musical satire Slam Frank will depend a lot on the “now” you think we live in at the moment you see it. The show’s subject matter, Anne Frank and her family’s attempt to hide from the Nazis, belongs to the 1930s and 40s; but through a slippery and intentionally frustrating framing device, its creators Andrew Fox (music and lyrics) and Joel Sinensky (the book) have ported in all the hallucinogenically chaotic politics of our moment. In their vision, what we’re watching isn’t just a straightforward retelling of the Franks’ plight but the attempt of one egotistical crazed community-theater director (John Anker Bow, with an ominous smile and a dangly feathered earring) to reframe that story in line with what he considers contemporary sensibilities, and make himself famous along the way. To that end, he’s recast Anne as “Anita Franco” (played by Olivia Bernábe) a young Latina woman from the “barrio of Frankfurt” who also happens to have a Black feminist mother (Austen Horne), and a queer neurodivergent father (Rocky Paterra). The Van Daan family, once they arrive, include a gender-questioning kid (Alex Lewis), a horny and repressed mom (Jaz Zepatos), and the requisite cis male patriarch of a villain (Bow again, in manspreading mode). In their attic, they lament that “outside, they’re fighting a war, but in here, we’re fighting expectations,” a Cabaret-like intro to a number that’s a sort of “happy village” song from a Disney musical, except every one of the villagers is obsessed with being marginalized.

In Slam Frank’s identitarian fantasia, the actors in its show within a show are, like that theater director, high on the perceived power of the work they’re doing in revising history. More than once, a character will remind Anita of the importance of sharing her story as a Latinx person “now,” which creates an intentional irony with the actual Anne Frank’s circumstances in wartime  Europe, where food, shelter, and safety were more important than living your truth. (Living your truth is the main goal of people in that artistic director’s vision of the world; that, and an endless “oppression Olympics.”) At one point, the tension between the now of the 1940s and the now of Slam Frank’s present leads to a whole “who’s on first?” bit with her mother. Though as you watch the musical, you may start to wonder what “now,” exactly, Fox and Sinensky think we are living in. Is the world of theater ruled by men like that artistic director? (Oskar Eustis, for one, is retiring soon.)

Many of Slam Frank’s reference points belong to a recent, but given the accelerated feeling of discourse in the present moment, already distant past. Fox, the driving force behind the project, started writing Slam Frank after reading about a Twitter debacle in 2022 caused by someone positing that Frank herself experienced “white privilege.” (The author of that original tweet was, as it turns out, a fringe cult leader who has since been arrested.) After some time in development, the show premiered at Asylum NYC, the tiny theater that first berthed Titaníque, last fall, and has ridden a wave of online debate, and what Fox has called “market gap” in other theater producers’ interest in tackling edgy material, to a run Off Broadway this fall. At the Orpheum, where Slam Frank has settled in, you’ll find the theater dressed for the occasion, complete with Oh, Mary! posters near the bathrooms that imagine other misguided productions, like a multi-racial Leopoldstadt and a 12 Angry Thems.

The roots of Slam Frank’s ax-grinding back further: To the end-of-the-Obama era historical revisionism of Hamilton, which is often the direct target of Fox’s musical satire, and to the spate of artistically-dead, progressive-by-committee musicals that chased its success. (I get it. I once had to review Some Like It Hot.) Though Slam Frank’s comedy often lands in a place that is as vicious — at one point it directly quotes lyrics from Suffs — as it is opportunistically easy and slightly quaint. Fox and Sinensky are fond of humor that’s less shocking than it is overfamiliar, tilling the same fields that post-woke, post-COVID comedians have already farmed to exhaustion. Fitting for a musical borne from Twitter, you may feel as if, while watching it, you are stuck scrolling online. One punchline builds to a character using the word “retarded” — comedy’s new, overused “safest slur,” as my colleague Hershal Pandya put it last year. There is a lot of material about Anita’s father’s sexuality that lies in the realm of “we’re doing homophobia, but in a way that means you’re annoying if you complain about it.” In each case, it’s less transgressive than you’d think to see this material trotted out in 2026. I was ready to be shocked and offended, and might even have liked it, I was more often a little bored. Oh, startling: another joke about how land acknowledgements are lame.

Slam Frank’s provocations, however, are leavened by Fox’s genuine skill with and respect for musical theater. The frustration that seethes through the show is often born of the disappointment that a form as quicksilver and astounding as songwriting can be yoked to small-minded and propagandistic ends. The purest argument against that flattening, however, isn’t when Fox is revving up for another line about pansexuality but instead when he lets his songwriting enjoy itself and gives his stars the chance to show off their own talent. He may resent what Hamilton hath wrought, but he’s got an impressive ear for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s flow. One of Anita’s verses (all delivered with impressive ease and winning naïveté by Bernábe) uses the family’s involvement with jam manufacturing to incorporate an astounding number of rhymes for “pectin,” followed by a run that goes, “sew your patch in, guess that’s what happens when we let the Nazis dictate the fashions.” It’s a level of delight with language that’s its own argument for itself — and against, too, the pop songwriters recruited to write sludge for name-brand vehicles on Broadway.

Slam Frank tends to function best when it’s doing its own version of Forbidden Broadway, full of in-jokes, Patti LuPone references, and let’s-put-on-a-show spirit. Sam Lafarge, the director, is fond of sending up Jamie Lloyd — the show-within-a-show’s director must’ve loved Sunset Blvd., given the number of cameras involved — and peppers his staging with Easter eggs for an eager Off Broadway audience, from the beginner-level use of a Dear Evan Hansen polo to the more advanced quoting of niche theater TikToks. I was most won over by Slam Frank when it became un-selfconsciously sillier: a montage of powerful women that alternates between respected figures like Oprah and infamous scammers, pornstars, and killers before just projecting one photo of Anne Hathaway after another; a moment where a character announces they are non-binary, which “falls under the trans umbrella,” and they unfurl an actual prop umbrella. It’s lame. It’s dumb. It’s good musical comedy.

Even a show about the pointlessness of political musicals must eventually get around it making its own point. In the last stretch of Slam Frank, the show turns serious, as Anne’s silent sister Margot starts talking. (She’s played by Amelia Louise Barr, who emphasizes her portentous cheekbones when she’s not shouting from the side of the stage under a blanket in her double-role as Anita’s overwrought abuela.) Margot is the only character whose identity hasn’t been bent in Slam Frank’s show-within-a-show. She recites a Jewish prayer, dresses in period costume, and, once prodded, announces her own plan for the future would she survive, which begins with Fox setting up a rhyme that lines up perfectly with — and this does make the audience take a collective breath — “Palestine.” From there, Slam Frank launches into what’s potentially a send up of the antisemitic possibilities of anti-Zionism, or a parody of what some Zionists might consider to be offensive, or — I could go on.

My instincts, and sense of the musical’s distaste for anti-colonial “land-back” slogans, pointed toward the simplest interpretation: Fox and Sinensky are frustrated with how they imagine leftists, in this case that over-woke director, will sympathize with any group but Jewish people, whom he’s turned into sneering villains. But given that Fox and Sinensky have contained their work within nestling dolls of meta-theatrical deniability, it’s hard to say with certainty just where their beliefs finally land, if they land anywhere at all. I walked out of the theater as people around me debated the show’s last 20 minutes, and have read a variety of takes online since. Here is one thorough debate about that ending for those who wish to be spoiled; I will also suggest a friend’s summary that its closing vision of identity politics ad absurdum was “a big South Park-ian shrug.” Among recent theater that has wrestled, even tangentially, with the Jewish diaspora’s relationship to Israel, like Birthright, Jewish Plot, or Giant, Slam Frank is notable both for its gregarious impudence and then sudden caution. It is as if the show has barreled toward one idea and then decided to avoid it, hoping to move off a subject it itself has broached. At one point in that sequence, after Margot’s song, a character mutters that they will all now stop talking about Palestine now because it is of no importance to the events of their present. That’s one of the wobbliest of the timeline-hopping jokes in the show. The audience, by then, once united in laughing at its easier targets of parody, had become more fractious and ill-at-ease. It was clear, by that point, that the show’s “now” was not a shared experience.

Slam Frank is at the Orpheum Theatre through November 29.