A few years ago, Andrew Fox had an incredibly bad idea. He turned the story of Anne Frank into a satirical hip-hop musical: intersectional, inclusive and nonsensical. Fox was a theater-loving composer who became disillusioned with the industry in general and humorless and preachy productions in particular. His gloomy worldview was not helped by his habit of spending hours on social media, where in 2022 he faced a debate over whether Anne Frank was a beneficiary of “white privilege” – despite her Jewish identity, which led to her being hunted down by Nazi soldiers and sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died in 1945 at the age of fifteen. Like many viral online debates, this one was fairly one-sided, with most people seeming to agree that the idea was ridiculous, including celebrity gossip site TMZ, which covered the controversy and issued its own dismissive verdict in the form of a dumbfounded face emoji.
Despite this, Fox couldn't shake the idea of a series that would try to update Frank's story with modern political sensitivities. He wrote a rap that owed much to Eminem's “8 Mile” in the voice of a brash teenager whose hip-hop bravado was only slightly tempered by the fact that she and her family were crammed into an attic, hoping not to be discovered and killed: “When this cover-up is over, I'll be in demand and my prose will be tougher / And if survival isn't in the cards, I'll be a ghost writer.” He decided that his Anne Frank would not be white, but a Latina, raised in “the hoods of Frankfurt” with an introverted father who liked to remind people that he was neurodivergent; she is in love with Peter, a fellow refugee whose gender identity is the subject of an inspirational acoustic guitar ballad called “Non-Binary”. Fox continued to write songs and began recruiting collaborators, each of whom had to decide whether they wanted to risk their careers by signing him. One actor sent the script to his manager and received a letter back warning that the show “may end up being more of a satire of progressive theater than a true reimagining of the Anne Frank story.” The manager was not mistaken in anything, but the actor still devoted himself to the show.
Against cautious theater professionals—and perhaps common sense—“Slam Frank” came to life. Fox arranged a top-secret table read, booked under a pseudonym, to limit backlash if people didn't like it. He staged a one-off show, and then, in September, Slam Frank began to develop at the Asylum NYC, a comedy theater on East Twenty-fourth Street that has one hundred and fifty seats around a small stage. For months, Foxx has been building a following on social media, posting a series of deadpan updates on Instagram and TikTok from the dedicated “Slam Frank” account. When one user asked why on earth Anne Frank spoke Spanish, Foxx wrote in mock irritation: “Because she's an immigrant?” When another noted that one of the songs sounded a bit like Kanye West, who recently added to his infamy by promoting a website that sells swastika T-shirts, Fox responded: “Unfortunately, we wrote this song BEFORE we discovered he was monetizing and appropriating Jain and Hindu symbols.” Almost every day, when people wondered if it was all a sham, Fox responded with a joke that ended up not being a joke and turned into something of a mission statement: “Slam Frank is a real musical.”
On a recent Wednesday evening, a line of cheerful theatergoers stretched along Twenty-fourth Street, waiting to be checked by a security guard with a hand-held metal detector. To Fox's knowledge, security protocol has yet to prevent any planned violence, but a security guard once told Fox, who also stars in the musical, that his own performance could use a little more “heart.” (Fox decided he agreed and changed his approach accordingly.) On and off stage, Fox is a restless and talkative guy who seems to pace back and forth even when sitting still. Aside from the security guard's performance, the reaction to “Slam Frank” was generally positive—perhaps surprisingly, given Foxx's obvious desire to annoy just about everyone. New York Time called the show “smart” and “joyfully provocative”; London Time called it is “the most brilliant new musical in New York”, and expressed hope that it could “save Broadway”. The bad reviews also helped: Fox News called it “grotesque” and someone started an online petition calling the production “deeply offensive” and demanding its cancellation; the petition provided a useful source of controversy, although it was signed by fewer than a thousand people. “Slam Frank” was originally planned for three weeks, which turned into four months; it is now scheduled to run until December 28th. In the lobby before the show, people could buy drinks and merchandise, including a PROBLEM ATTIC baseball cap and a Slam Frank skull cap, which required a trip to a Judaica store in Borough Park, Brooklyn. “I want the Slam Frank yarmulke to be the best yarmulke that anyone has ever had,” Fox told me, sounding a little like the arrogant artistic director of a regional theater company—which was essentially the role Fox played in the show.
The character was Fox's main concession to respectability. Joel Sinensky, a screenwriter and playwright who was Fox's childhood friend, wrote the book, and they agreed that Slam Frank should be a meta-musical. It opens with a memorable pretentious speech from the artistic director, who is also the scapegoat; viewers can blame the character, not the creators, for anything that offends them. (Mel Brooks did something similar in The Producers, whose plot gave audiences license to laugh at Hitler's Spring, the gloriously flawed mini-musical at the heart of the show.) Even so, Fox knew he didn't want to rely on simple punchlines about safe places and warnings. “The last good trigger warning joke was made around 2017,” he told me. He wanted the audience to be drawn in, despite themselves, by the sight and sound of the characters living in the attic, singing, “Outside they're waging war/But here we're fighting expectations!” This meant that the songs shouldn't just sound like jokes. “If I'm writing this big queer anthem, I need at least the first three minutes of it—before it goes off the rails—for a group of queer teenagers to want to perform it in their college theater program,” Fox says.
