‘Slam Frank’ Strikes Off-Broadway With Provocative Marketing campaign 

The most incendiary musical comedy of 2025 will advance to the off-Broadway Orpheum Theatre in October, and its creators are marking the present’s return with, not surprisingly, two provocative occasions.  

The field workplace for Slam Frank, which reimagines Anne Frank’s story by means of an “intersectional, multiethnic, genderqueer, Afro-Latin hip-hop lens,” in keeping with the producers, opens on June 12, the birthday of the Jewish teen whose diary of her household’s life hiding from the Nazis turned a traditional of Holocaust literature.  

The following week, on June 19 — Juneteenth — the present’s producers will host what they’re calling “Off-Broadway’s First Annual Official Belated Pro-Diversity, Pre-Julyteenth, Cismasc-Affirming, Anti-Capitalist, LatinX, Anne Frank  Fiesta de Quinceañera” on the Orpheum on Second Avenue in Manhattan’s East Village.  

Theatergoers who attend the occasion, which begins at 6 p.m., could have the chance to buy seats from the $50 and $70 pricing tiers for $36, and $36 shall be shaved off the value of all different seating.  (A rep for the present explains that 36 is an element of 18, which in Hebrew numerology symbolizes life.) Special friends and performances are additionally promised. Additional ticket info may be discovered here.

Directed by Sam LaFrage, previews of Slam Frank will start on Sept. 17, the one-year anniversary of the present’s developmental run at The Asylum in Midtown. The musical formally opens Oct. 4 and can proceed by means of Nov. 30. 

Slam Frank was impressed by an precise, viral 2022 Twitter thread that requested if Anne Frank ever acknowledged her “white privilege,” and imagines what occurs when a progressive neighborhood theater firm transforms Frank’s story right into a hyper-woke parable. Co-created by Joel Sinensky and Andrew Fox, who composed the music, which, he has mentioned, was influenced by a variety of artists, together with Kanye West, Stephen Sondheim, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jason Robert Brown and Wilson Phillips. Fox additionally has mentioned the play’s politics are deliberately elusive, however its essential goal is identity-politics excesses.  

Fox additionally spearheads the play’s typically inflammatory Instagram account, which now boasts 98,000 followers and helped generate sold-out crowds at The Asylum with out advantage of a advertising funds.  

Critics referred to as Slam Frank one of many boldest theatrical experiences of 2025. Former New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley praised the musical on social media as “the most important show around,” and the Times named it the “Funniest Spoof of the Left” in its Best Comedy of 2025 recap. And Zachary Stewart of TheaterMania wrote, “If you love the theater and want it to once again be a safe space for dangerous thought, the best thing you can do is buy a ticket to Slam Frank and laugh your ass off.”