Effective satire draws blood. When Slam Frank ended I was bled out. This “Anne-Frank Afro-Latin-Hip-Hop Musical,” music and lyrics by Andrew Fox, book by Joel Sinensky, is a head-on collision with our cultural moment. Let’s look at the wreckage.
First things first–anyone averse to spoofery regarding Anne Frank and her travails in the attic should find another show; this goes way beyond the ignorant idiocies of Justin Bieber and the “belieber” comment he left at her house in Amsterdam some years back. She is for good reason a sainted figure, if among certain U.S. school districts this Banned Book Week a perennially polarizing one. Great story, but kind of a downer, the conservative, umm, “thinking” goes. Don’t feel too smug, however, as in 2022 there was a leftwing critique, too, a notorious X thread that asked, “Did Anne Frank ever check her white privilege?” How on the level this was I can’t say–we were in the thick of what’s now called “Woke 1,” and the counteraction to the Caligulan excesses of the right was, as AOC recently put it, “crazy.” Fox and Sinensky have chosen to take that statement at face value, and run with it wearing a poker face that never drops, using the nice, upstanding, Tony-approved Afro-Latin-Hip-Hop Musical Hamilton as a way of entry.
After a (botched) land acknowledgment and a (confused) shout-out to the LGB, etc. community an artistic director at a small, rigorously progressive regional theater (John Anker Bow) frames the show. TBH in an era of rising antisemitism and fading memories of the Holocaust a fresh, education-minded take on Anne Frank isn’t the worst idea, if one to be approached discreetly. That’s not what we’re about to watch, though, as caution is thrown to the wind in a tornado of political correctness and everyone can sing and dance with gay abandon (very gay) in their hiding place. It’s the early Forties (except when it isn’t) and after a blizzard of video clips to, you know, make the piece relevant we’re off to the attic, which functions, metaphorically, as a closet. Anne (Olivia Bernábe) is now Anita, who’s wrestling with her suppressed Latinx heritage. Father Otto (Rocky Paterra) is wrestling with everything, not limited to neurodivergence, ADHD, and a new physio-psychological syndrome announced every few minutes. Mother Edith (Austen Horne), an imposing Black woman of ramrod straight bearing, is wrestling with everyone, soon to include their fellow refugees the Van Daan family. (For all her carping about white supremacy she urges Anne to write her fabled diary in English, not Spanish; more saleable.) Mr. Van Daan (also Bow) is a blowhard J.K. Simmons type, espousing ugly American masculinity in loud shirts; Mrs. Van Daan (Jaz Zepatos) lives under his thumb, in need of liberation; and son Peter (Alex Lewis) is Anne/Anita- and trans-curious. Above the fray, or to the side of it anyway, is Anne’s silent sister Margot (Amelia Louise Barr), who doubles as Anita’s abuela. (There’s also a hunky stagehand.)
The interplay of them all is pretty funny, and “naughty,” sketch comedy gone amuck, as much Oh, Mary! as Hamilton, with a succession of bright parody songs and sendups of the usual musical comedy tropes, like confetti drops. But that wouldn’t be enough to put it over the top. The well-meaning, if irritating, cant of woke language is a subject ripe for parody, and the creators have squeezed the juice out of low-hanging fruit. The audacity of Slam Frank, however, is that it keeps on going, and going, following the pitfalls of language policing, fungible identity politics, “empowerment,” and talking without listening, to their logical, bitter end. After another, disturbing barrage of up-to-the-moment video there is a happy, musical theater kind of windup, employing a deus ex history to bring us home…but you’re just as likely to be left stunned, not laughing. I wanted to give the immensely talented cast a standing O, yet I couldn’t rise from my seat. Lots of shows seem to be going there, into the darkness, only to veer–provoking and reassuring, wounding and healing, and satisfying commercial and marketing demands without being too edgy. Slam Frank goes there, beyond even something like Cabaret, into that netherworld where the far left and far right converge.
Applause? Yes. That extends to director Sam LaFrage, who keeps numerous plates spinning in the air for two intermissionless hours without them crashing down, choreographer Esosa Oviasue, and the entire design team: Adam Koch (sets), Devin Orr (props), Sarah Lockwood (costumes), Jamie Roderick (lights), Gage Baker (audio), and Zach Lobel and Nicholas Ferrari, handling the eyebrow-raising video design. The production resides at the theater that housed Stomp for decades, and Slam Frank, too, stomps…and romps, and cuts, and slashes, and burns. Confrontational, excessive, and overpowering, it forces you to deal with it.
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