‘A couple of times people walked out’: how an Anne Frank musical became the hottest theater ticket of the year

‘We are teasing, but not actually making fun of the identity. What the show plays with is the idea of your identity equaling your ethics, because that’s just not true.’ Photograph: Shawn Salley

It’s difficult to not invoke the term “woke” when discussing Slam Frank, the 2025 musical that reimagines Anne Frank as a pansexual Latina. Controversial even before its first performance, it giddily satirizes identity politics through its show-within-a-show structure, in which a progressive theatre company attempts to modernize the Holocaust victim’s story by paralleling it to the struggles faced by marginalized people today. Here, the mother of “Anita” is Black, her father is neurodivergent and, while hiding in Amsterdam, they are very much immigrants.

Creator Andrew Fox recognizes “a temptation to categorize it as anti-woke art”, but points readily at the show’s fans and detractors, who fall across every conceivable party line, and cautions against one-note interpretations. “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.”