How Slam Frank Turned Internet Discourse Into a Provocative Off-Broadway Musical

There are musicals that gently welcome audiences into their worlds, and then there is Slam Frank. Now playing off-Broadway at the Orpheum Theatre, the gleefully provocative comedy imagines what might happen if a hyper-progressive theater company decided Anne Frank’s story needed a hip-hop makeover for the modern age. Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek met with the cast and creative team to unpack the musical that wants audiences laughing, squirming and preferably arguing about it afterward.

The origins of Slam Frank began with a very real piece of internet discourse. Composer and lyricist Andrew Fox traces the musical’s origin to a 2022 Twitter debate over whether Anne Frank had ever acknowledged her privilege, a conversation so surreal that it sparked an equally surreal theatrical question in his mind. He eventually brought the idea to longtime friend and writer Joel Sinensky, despite knowing exactly how alarming the pitch sounded. “I said, ‘Do you want to do this?’ And he said, ‘Well, that's terrifying,’” Fox recalls. It was then that Sinensky knew: “The fact that it's terrifying means I should probably do it.”

For Sinensky, that discomfort quickly became part of the show’s mission rather than something to sand down. He and Fox wanted to use the immediacy of live performance to give audiences something less soothing than the average night at the theater. “A lot of theater you see feels very safe and very relaxing,” Sinensky says. “Where you're there, and you're like, ‘I don't have to worry, it's all good. Nothing's going to unsettle me too much, I can just chill out.’ And for us, theater—the nature of you being in the room with the actors—makes it a unique medium to shock, and to unsettle and to take you on a ride.”

Olivia Bernábe is at the center of that ride as Anne, a role they never imagined would come their way. For all the musical’s irreverence, Bernábe approaches the historical figure underneath the satire with complete seriousness. “It's been such a privilege to play Anne,” they say. “Despite the irreverence of the show, it's something that I actually don't take lightly. It's a very sacred role and I would really never get to play her in any other world.” They are also clear about where the show directs its comic fire. Audiences may encounter plenty designed to test their comfort level, but Bernábe says neither Anne nor her family are targets. “Anne Frank is never the butt of any joke. We are not mocking her story. We're not mocking her family. We're not mocking what she went through. That's really important to me.”

Actor Austen Horne, who plays Anne’s mother Edith, has developed perhaps the most economical description of the show’s chaotic cocktail of history, satire and musical theater. “It reminds me so much of getting the entire family together at Thanksgiving, and everyone's fighting and everyone's just really speaking their truth,” she says. “I think this show, you mix family Thanksgiving with five generations, Anne Frank and a little bit of Hamilton and here you are.”

Rounding out the Frank family is Rocky Paterra as Anne's father, Otto. The chaotic nature of family Thanksgiving that Horne described has been seen firsthand by Paterra and is a rare gem of the Slam Frank viewing experience. "I kind of compare it to how the movie Clue, when people went to see that in theaters, they showed different endings and everyone would walk out of the theater being like, 'Did we just see the same thing?' With Slam Frank, everyone's saying that, but they all saw the same show," he says. "That's something that has been really fascinating, just the way that you come in projecting your own experiences onto everything that is happening, and it can create totally different conversations."

That relationship with the audience is baked into the musical’s DNA. Fox describes Slam Frank as constantly inviting viewers to settle into an idea before abruptly pulling their chair out from under them, an elaborate game of theatrical trust and betrayal. “It feels like the best episode of Punk'd every five minutes,” he says. Beneath all that mischief, however, Director Sam LaFrage sees the show’s skewering of musical theater as something that can only come from genuinely loving the form. That complicated affection may ultimately be the neatest description of what the musical is trying to do. As LaFrage sums up, “Slam Frank is a love letter to musical theater, and it's also a warning to musical theater, and it's also a hate letter to musical theater.”

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