Alex Lewis, Jaz Zepatos, Olivia Bernábe, Rocky Paterra, and Austen Horne in Slam Frank at the Orpheum Theatre (© Shawn Salley Photography)
by Jacklyn Collier, Co-host of The OnStage Blog Theatre Podcast
I love seeing new plays, and the buzz around the opening for the expanded run of Slam Frank at The Orpheum had me hooked. Everyone seemed to have strong feelings about it, and I didn't want to form my opinion from headlines or other people's takes. I wanted to see it for myself so I could be part of the conversation.
Slam Frank is a musical about a musical. Its fictional regional theater company, earnest, ultra-progressive, and very pleased with itself, has decided to "reimagine" The Diary of Anne Frank as a hip-hop show built around every identity box it can check.
Anne becomes Anita Franco, a Latina teen who writes her diary in Spanish. Her mother, Edith, is a Black feminist slam poet, her father, Otto, is neurodivergent and eventually comes out as gay, and her sister Margot hardly says a word. The show was sparked by a real 2022 online debate over whether Anne Frank had "white privilege," and it opens with the company's artistic director fumbling a land acknowledgment, which tells you exactly what kind of evening you're in for.
For the first two-thirds, I was loving it. The music is great: genuine bops, one after another. The staging is immersive, with playful projections and live footage of actors filmed onstage and backstage, beamed up for the audience to see. And as a leftist (though I'd like to think not the insufferable kind who cares more about virtue signaling than the causes themselves), I found the jabs at the far left fun rather than offensive. A number in which Peter van Daan comes out as nonbinary, and Anita declares herself pansexual, had me laughing.
The performances are excellent across the board, but two stood out. Austen Horne, as Edith, held the audience in the palm of her hand with "Yeast of Edith," a hilarious, furious slam poem raging against male playwrights like Neil Simon and David Mamet. And Olivia Bernábe's Anita speaks straight to the audience with bright-eyed ingenue optimism, but with teeth.
Then the show takes a dark turn. In reviewing this show, I have been asked by the folks at Slam Frank not to spoil how the show ends. So, I have to be vaguer than I want to be as far as what unfolds towards the end.
What I feel I can say comfortably is that the final third of the show, the part that draws the most controversy and the most walkouts, doesn't just flirt with Jewish stereotypes; it puts them onstage in their crudest, most visual form, the kind of imagery lifted straight from antisemitic propaganda.
The problem is that by then, the framing device has slipped away. The self-congratulatory artistic director, who is supposed to remind us we're watching his misguided production, stops showing up, and it becomes easy to forget the convention entirely. Without that frame, the stereotypes don't read as the fictional company's failure. They read, to me, as what the musical itself is telling us.
Somewhere in the final third of Slam Frank, two people in my row bolted for the exit and slammed the theater door behind them. By that point, I understood the impulse.
It made me sick to my stomach. As a leftist, none of the jabs at the far left offended me. But as a non-Jew, I felt extremely uncomfortable watching these harmful stereotypes play out onstage. This might just be my perception, but the Jewish stereotypes depicted on stage felt more harmful and attacking than the other stereotypes played for laughs earlier in the play.
I understand that creators Andrew Fox (music and lyrics) and Joel Sinensky (book) are Jewish, and they're likely satirizing people who traffic in antisemitism in the name of progressivism. But satire needs a clear target, and here it got so caught up that it became a mess to untangle.
Slam Frank is a show I'll be thinking about for a long time. But instead of leaving with the fun, irreverent buzz of those first two-thirds, I walked out wildly uncomfortable. It brought to mind Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night, a novel about an American who poses as a Nazi propagandist and becomes what he pretends to be. As Vonnegut put it: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
Some shows leave you uncomfortable because they've challenged your thinking; Slam Frank left me uncomfortable because I wasn't convinced it understood the damage it was doing, and I’m not sure I really want to be a part of the conversation it started. Your mileage may vary though.
Slam Frank plays the Orpheum Theatre through November 30.