A new off-Broadway musical that reimagines Anne Frank as a pansexual Latina rapper has become one of the season’s most talked-about productions, drawing large audiences and sharply divided responses.
Titled Slam Frank, the 2025 piece uses a show-within-a-show structure in which a progressive theatre company attempts to modernize the Holocaust victim’s story, drawing parallels between historical persecution and the struggles of marginalized groups today. The production reframes the central figure as “Anita,” whose family in hiding in Amsterdam is portrayed as immigrants; the mother is Black and the father is neurodivergent.
The creative team and cast have acknowledged the controversy surrounding the concept. The show was contentious even before opening night, and there have been reports of walkouts at some performances. Creator Andrew Fox said he understood “a temptation to categorize it as anti-woke art,” but urged audiences and observers against one-dimensional readings of the work.
“I think the piece is just trying to grapple with the last 15 years of cultural and intellectual upheaval and get some comedy out of it,” Fox said, framing the musical as an attempt to engage with contemporary debates about identity and representation rather than to settle them.
Producers and performers have described Slam Frank as a satire that deliberately courts discomfort as part of its theatrical argument. The show’s blending of historical subject matter with present-day identity politics has produced a wide range of reactions: enthusiastic support from some quarters, and critical pushback from others. Those responses, Fox and others involved note, do not fall neatly along predictable ideological lines.
As the run continues, the production is likely to remain under scrutiny both for its artistic choices and for the broader questions it raises about how historical tragedies are adapted and retold on stage. The creative team says the aim is to provoke discussion and to use comedy and satire to examine the shifting cultural landscape of the past decade and a half.
Slam Frank’s combination of contentious subject matter and popular attention underscores ongoing debates in theatre and the arts about adaptation, artistic freedom and the responsibilities of storytellers when engaging with painful histories.