"Slam Frank" musical premieres off-Broadway at Orpheum — SkimNews
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- Slam Frank opens October 4 at the Orpheum theatre, running through November 30, after a sold-out run at Asylum NYC where former New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it "the most important new show around."
- Andrew Fox and Joel Sinensky developed the musical after Fox encountered a 2022 tweet dissecting Anne Frank's alleged white privilege, with Hamilton as a stylistic inspiration but a deliberate refusal of Hamilton's clear ideology.
- Patti LuPone visited backstage at Asylum NYC to tell the cast she'd been moved, and the show's social media — including an Instagram post reading "Fasting is Fatphobic" shared on Yom Kippur — has drawn accusations of trolling that Fox embraces.
- The musical was ejected from a BMI workshop over its non-binary coming out song, which Fox says became the favorite number of new non-binary members who joined the following year.
- Director Sam LaFrage and actor Walker Stovall cite their own past immersion in "woke" culture as informing the satire; Stovall says woke ideology "got in the way of connecting with other people."
- Olivia Bernábe, the non-binary actor playing Anita, says some audience members have walked out during performances, attributing exits to viewers "forgetting that it's satire."
Why it matters: With a sold-out workshop run, a former NYT critic's endorsement, and a Patti LuPone backstage visit, Slam Frank has converted a comedy-club experiment into a genuine off-Broadway premiere that audiences across the political spectrum equally love and hate. The creators' deliberate refusal of a clear ideology is the show's central pitch: that post-"Woke 1.0" theater can profit by satirizing both identity-politics sanctimony and the reverence surrounding Holocaust memory.
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