If they can do it to Abe Lincoln with “Oh, Mary!,” why not Anne Frank with “Slam Frank”? The new musical comedy about the Holocaust’s most beloved young heroine opened Monday at the Orpheum Theatre after a brief run off Broadway last year.
Songwriter Andrew Fox and book writer Joel Sinensky were reportedly inspired to write the show after a Twitter thread about Anne Frank’s “white privilege” went viral in 2022. As “Slam Frank” sees it, would the diary of Anne Frank have been published if written by a young girl of color, that is, someone named Anita Frank?
The satire begins even before that young heroine (Olivia Bernábe) appears. A show within a show, “Slam Frank” kicks off with an artistic director (John Anker Bow) welcoming us to the Orpheum Theatre with a “land acknowledgement” statement. The only problem is, he gets mixed up and can’t remember which indigenous tribes used to live there long before the neighborhood became the East Village.
This is the subversive world of “Slam Frank”! No minority group — or no strongly held belief, for that matter — escapes getting slapped down. But fear not: white cis males get the most punishment. As one character explains, “It’s men like you who voted for Hitler and got us in this damn mess in the first place!”
The show’s major change from its uncredited source material, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” is that Anne is now Anita, a Latina from a barrio in Frankfurt, Germany. When the family must immigrate to the Netherlands during World War II, not all of the Franks survive the trip. While old Abuela Frank (Amelia Louise Barr) drowns crossing some river, her spirit never leaves granddaughter Anita, who insists on writing her diary in Spanish.
Only briefly does she call herself Anne and write in English. That betrayal of her Latina roots comes when papa Otto Frank (Rocky Paterra) gently advises about the diary, “I know I told you to express yourself … but that was before I realized there could be a real market for this thing.”
Unlike “Oh, Mary!,” which is a complete fantasy, the nearly two-hour “Slam Frank” is a tad too faithful to its famous source material in the show’s first half hour. The Latina thing aside, Anne/Anita’s parents welcome the Van Daan family to their already-crowded Amsterdam hideout. The expected arguments about sharing food and space emerge, and as we know from “The Diary of Anne Frank,” older sister Margot (the double-cast Barr) quickly becomes the odd person out.
“Slam Frank” bills itself as the “Anne-Frank Afro-Latin Hip-Hop Musical,” and, indeed, Anne/Anita delivers a lively hip-hop number at the top of the show. In musical jargon, it is the ubiquitous “What I Want Song” that every musical needs to establish its heroine’s quest. Bernábe is just as spunky as the most insufferable Disney princess. Unfortunately, the lyrics of “An Immigrant Girl” are almost unintelligible thanks to Gage Baker’s brash sound design.
More problematic: Imagine if anyone wanted to turn “Oh, Mary!” into a musical. The music would slow down the play’s relentless rapid-fire pace. For the record, the most popular musicals are not musical comedies but rather musical romances with comic elements.
Sinensky’s book, fortunately, gathers momentum the further it strays from the real story. As wickedly retold here, the Franks and the Van Daans don’t miss a letter in what’s called LGBTQ. In fact, they add a few more to that overly long initialism: Anne/Anita’s love interest, the young Peter Van Daan (Alex Lewis), announces that he’s non-binary to absolutely no one’s surprise. Anne/Anita doesn’t stop loving him, leading her to believe she’s actually pansexual. This coming-out epidemic also leads Otto Frank to declare that he’s full-blown gay (also to no one’s surprise), which forces wife Edith (Austen Horne) to join the lavender bandwagon by saying she’s asexual. That she is also a Black militant feminist has already been well established by Horne’s strong impersonation of Angela Davis.
As a songwriter, Fox is at his best when he delivers spot-on parodies of Broadway’s ubiquitous anthems of empowerment.
The comic highpoint comes when Anne/Anita’s Latin heritage is explained with a show-stopping number that depicts the Frank family’s previous life in the Frankfurt barrio. It’s possible that this extended song, a reprise of “Rewrite My Diary,” might be more effective if placed in the show’s problematic first half-hour. In the show’s first few minutes, too many of the jokes regarding Anne really being Anita are more head-scratching than downright funny.
Anyone seeing “Slam Frank” must wonder how its makers will handle the Nazis’ brutal capture of the Franks and the Van Daans. The show doesn’t avoid that horror show so much as it supplants it with about a half dozen different endings, one more audacious and jaw dropping than the next. And yes, the word “Palestine” comes up.
Sam Lafrage’s direction can’t obscure some of the show’s early book problems. However, when the songs and story finally take off, Lafrage knows just how to create total comic chaos. Mayhem is the point.
The post ‘Slam Frank’ Off Broadway Review: How Do You Parody the Holocaust’s Most Beloved Young Heroine? appeared first on TheWrap.
