The 2025 production Slam Frank has quickly become one of the most polarizing and anticipated tickets in New York theater. The musical, which reimagines the historical figure of Anne Frank as a pansexual Latina, utilizes a show-within-a-show structure to satirize modern identity politics through the lens of a fictional, overly progressive theater troupe struggling to modernize their source material.
Scheduled for an off-Broadway premiere at the Orpheum theatre on 4 October, the show follows a sold-out run at the Asylum NYC comedy club last year. While the production is officially categorized as a workshop series, the upcoming run marks its formal debut. The project originated in 2022 when creator Andrew Fox discovered a viral tweet debating the alleged white privilege of Anne Frank. Intrigued by the absurdity of the discourse, Fox began drafting a hip-hop musical and invited his long-time school friend, Joel Sinensky, to collaborate as a writer. If you can believe it, when Fox stumbled across a 2022 tweet dissecting Frank’s alleged white privilege, the idea started online.
Sinensky notes that the duo felt a shared frustration with the state of contemporary theater. According to him, they were united by a desire to move away from didactic storytelling, which they feel has defined much of the commercial work produced over the past decade. By creating a meta-theatrical environment, the team aims to lampoon the current zeitgeist, encompassing the post-MeToo, post-Covid, and post-woke cultural landscapes. The production’s aesthetic draws heavy, albeit ironic, inspiration from the blockbuster musical Hamilton. Here, the mother of “Anita” is Black, her father is neurodivergent and, while hiding in Amsterdam, they are very much immigrants. “We have many things that we disagree on, but the thing that we were always very united on is this feeling that we were tired of didactic theater,” Sinensky says. “A lot of the work that’s been made commercially in the last decade has been very direct about what you’re supposed to take away from it, and we wanted to write something that was a reaction to that – that was about that.”. Post-Covid, post-“ Woke 1.0 ”) is certainly a target in the musical’s line of fire, its form lampoons the art that has resulted from that zeitgeist, so while the current sociopolitical moment (post-#MeToo. And its musical sensibility imitates its verbose, sloganeering rap, hamilton is a major inspiration – if that’s the word – with Slam Frank’s logo riffing on the blockbuster bio-musical’s own. Purposefully, is a clear ideology, what it doesn’t borrow from Hamilton.
Fox, who is Jewish, emphasizes that the goal was never to preach or convey a singular political message. Instead, the team consciously pivots whenever a scene begins to feel like a lecture, prioritizing reactions, humor, and shock value. This strategy of deliberate unpredictability has led to intense reactions. Social media channels for the show, managed by Fox, have frequently employed trolling tactics, such as posting messages like “Fasting is Fatphobic” during Yom Kippur to further cloud the production’s actual intent. “We committed pretty early to making something that, anytime we feel like we’re making one point and it’s starting to feel like a lecture, we swing in another direction,” he says. “It lets us focus on making the piece as effective as possible at getting reactions, getting laughs, getting shock.”.
The creative team openly acknowledges that their work draws criticism from across the political spectrum. Reddit threads have labeled Fox and Sinensky as everything from pro-Zionist and antisemitic to extremist left-wingers. For the creators, this confusion is a sign of success, proving that their satire is not easily co-opted by any single faction. Fox characterizes this as a “temptation to categorize it as anti-woke art,” but insists that the musical is merely grappling with 15 years of intellectual upheaval. But points readily at the show’s fans and detractors, who fall across every conceivable party line, and cautions against one-note interpretations. “I think the piece is just trying to grapple with the last 15 years of cultural and intellectual upheaval and get some comedy out of it.”, creator Andrew Fox recognizes “a temptation to categorize it as anti-woke art”.
Despite the online vitriol, the reception has been largely positive among theater critics. The production has even garnered praise from former New York Times critic Ben Brantley, who suggested it could be the most important new show current on the stage. Director Sam LaFrage noted that the show even attracted high-profile visitors, including Patti LuPone, who came backstage after a performance. LaFrage believes that the play-within-a-play format provides a vital, necessary container for artists to express things that were previously considered unspeakable due to cancel culture.
Actors involved in the project, such as Walker Stovall, describe the musical as a cathartic outlet for addressing their own pasts in socially conscious theater. The show’s narrative takes an increasingly aggressive turn in its final 20 minutes, moving from historical satire into a more profound critique of contemporary behavior. These closing moments have proven the most divisive, forcing audiences to confront uncomfortable truths about how the Holocaust is treated in the modern popular imagination.
Fox believes that the current cultural climate was essentially waiting for such a challenge. Citing producer Rick Rubin’s philosophy that ideas often exist in the air, Fox argues that audiences were already weary of traditional, sanitized approaches to sensitive historical topics. While some detractors have emailed the creators claiming that the show makes it impossible to take the Holocaust seriously, Fox maintains that the public was already moving in that direction on its own.
The production, which has seen some audience members walk out during performances, continues its run at the Orpheum theatre until 30 November. For the creators, the discomfort is not a bug, but a primary feature of the experience, ensuring that the work remains effective in its attempt to disrupt current theatrical norms.
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