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Demand for the US musical “Slam Frank” is enormous, so enormous that the New York production has been extended by two weeks. Six times a week, a character calledAnne Frankappears on stage at the “AsylumNYX” theatre – staged as a pansexual Latina and with an oversized yellow Jewish star on her chest.
In the play, the German Jew dances and raps about her experiences in hiding in Amsterdam, the basis of her world-famous diary. Instead of classic drama, the production focuses on hip hop and irony.
Frank, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1929, fled with her family from the Nazis to Amsterdam. During the German occupation, the Frank family went into hiding. For around two years, they sheltered in the back of Otto Frank’s father’s company. In 1944, the family was arrested by the Gestapo. Anne Frank died in the Bergen-Bergen concentration camp in the spring of 1945.
Satire with a mini-budget
“Slam Frank” sees itself as a satire and aims to poke fun at inclusivity and “wokeness”. Author and composer Andrew Fox, who is Jewish himself, wants to show how social debates can distort history.
The 38-year-old is directing a theatre group that is writing a play about Anne Frank. In the process, the production repeatedly slips into the absurd. The characters pin huge Jewish stars on their clothes or keep discovering new oppressed minorities.
Despite the controversial treatment and a marketing budget of just 60 US dollars, the play is almost sold out.
The provocative portrayal has triggered a fierce backlash. An online petition calls for the play to be cancelled immediately and accuses the makers of trivialising the Holocaust. “The musical turns the catastrophe of the Holocaust into a spectacle full of misinformation,” it says. “The pain of millions of people is ridiculed.”
Fox has defended the work, telling Britain’s Daily Mail: “When our shows sold out weeks in advance, we had hoped that we would have to turn away dozens of hopeful fans in our queue for remaining tickets. After all the negative coverage, it’s down to a handful.”
The composer says he was inspired by a Twitter dispute from 2022, when Anne Frank’s privileges as a white girl were discussed. As the New York Times writes, Anne Frank is less concerned with Nazis in the musical and more with her self-realisation. An approach that remains difficult to digest for many viewers.