The couple who walked out, late in a recent performance of the satirical musical “Slam Frank,” didn’t make a fuss. Seated down front, they left at a quiet moment — when an actor was onstage alone — and exited up the center aisle.
“You should wait it out,” the actor, Olivia Bernábe, told them as the band kept playing its underscore. From the audience came a smattering of laughter and applause.
“No, thank you,” one of the pair replied evenly, and the show went on.
It was a pretty tame disruption, but walkouts are absolutely welcome at this ultimately incendiary musical, which aims to unsettle and even anger.
Certainly its premise is provocative: A sanctimoniously inclusive regional theater company stages a hip-hop retelling of the Anne Frank story, in which Anne is a Latina teen who calls herself Anita (Bernábe); her father, Otto (Rocky Paterra), is neurodivergent and gay; and her mother, Edith (Austen Horne), is a Black feminist poet.
In keeping with the etiquette prohibition against revealing gargantuan spoilers, I won’t detail what kind of sharp turn “Slam Frank” makes deep in its second half, when it confrontationally claims a side in a highly charged contemporary dispute. That is, however, when this 110-minute show by Andrew Fox (music and lyrics) and Joel Sinensky (book) abruptly gets interesting — and it’s fair to wonder why it takes so long.
After a hot-ticket run last fall at the Manhattan comedy club Asylum NYC, Sam LaFrage’s production has resurfaced in the East Village at the Orpheum Theater, looking suitably glowed-up on a multilevel set by Adam Koch, and with a finely honed, mostly returning cast.
But the change of venue and the passage of time have brought a different vibe. The raucous energy the show had on a late-night comedy stage, in front of a late-night comedy audience, was not in evidence at the performance I saw at the Orpheum on a Friday at 7 p.m., with a crowd well short of boisterous. The authors’ relentless trolling of smug lefties is more grating than it used to be, because all of us, whatever our politics, have lived a year longer in what has become a 24/7 trolling culture. And sending up “Hamilton,” which the show does while borrowing from its template, just feels wan.
The previous bagginess of “Slam Frank” has morphed into bloatedness. As often happens with satire, it appears to be past its sell-by date — understandably, given that the catalyst for its creation was a noxious debate on Twitter in 2022. The topic: the ostensible “white privilege” of Anne Frank, a Jewish child who died in a Nazi concentration camp.
The potentially catastrophic danger of learning the wrong lessons from history is one of this musical’s primary preoccupations. Another is the way that individuals, and whole segments of humanity, use their membership in subgroups to place themselves — in their own minds — above other populations and, sometimes, beyond moral blame.
The central joke of the show is that the Franks and the Van Daans — two families who, in reality, hid together from the Nazis in an annex in Amsterdam during World War II — spend their time in concealment having awakenings about their respective niche identities. As Anita says, in what remains a sharp and funny line: “Sometimes, when you can’t easily explain your identity, it means it’s even better than all the others!”
But this overlong show stretches its razzing-the-wokerati joke so thin that there’s nothing substantial left to stand on by the time the authors truly have something to say. When that moment arrives, and the air in the theater is charged at last. Yet audience members have been so immersed in the musical’s snark and cynicism that they don’t know how to respond to the sudden tonal change, what they’re meant to laugh at or what they can trust is sincere. All around me, the crowd was quiet but restless, not rapt.
“Slam Frank” wants to throw us off balance. This time around, it’s succeeded at that too well for its own good, and for ours.
Slam Frank Through Nov. 30 at the Orpheum Theater, Manhattan; slamfrankmusical.com. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.
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