(Ben Kawaller’s article appeared in The Times, 10/17; Photo: The cast of Slam Frank on stage at AsylumNYC, JASPER LEWIS PHOTOGRAPHY.)
A show has turned the tragedy of Anne Frank into an ‘inclusive’ commentary on wokeness. And New York City audiences can’t get enough
I recently saw the most brilliant new musical in New York City. It’s not on Broadway. It’s not even in a traditional theatre.
It’s at a bar and performance space called AsylumNYC. And it lives up to the name of its venue.
Slam Frank, whose developmental run opened on September 17 and closes on October 26, is a reimagining of the story of Anne Frank that asks: What if her diary were inclusive? What if we addressed the lack of queer representation in that attic? What if we finally told the story of the Holocaust in a way that honours all people, not just the white people it has always centred on?
In other words: what if someone produced a musical about Anne Frank fit for the 2020s?
The result has been a hit. With mostly word-of-mouth buzz, driven by a monthly publicity budget of less than $60, Slam Frank has so far sold out 28 of its 34 performances, the show’s press agent told me.
The reason? It could be that, ever since the first election of Donald Trump, a reactionary “woke” piousness has taken root across America’s cultural institutions — especially in the theatre. Nearly every significant American theatre company continues to apologise for the arrival of Europeans on US soil and to offer pro forma declarations of its own enlightenment. And many shows of late (Thoughts of a Colored Man, The Thanksgiving Play, Liberation) have felt more sanctimonious than subversive.
But Slam Frank proves that true originality still exists in musical theatre. Sparked by a 2022 Twitter commenter who asserted that “Yeah, Anne Frank had white privilege”, it reimagines Anne as “Anita” — a pansexual Latina hiding from the Nazis in a radically inclusive attic with her militant black mother, her neurodiverse father and assorted other disordered personalities.
