‘Slam Frank’ Mistakes Opportunism for Bravery

Great satire can require courage, particularly if the subject matter is dark, and few subjects are as dark as the Holocaust. Several years back, the composer and lyricist Andrew Fox and the playwright and screenwriter Joel Sinensky were intrigued by a social media query that was either satirical or, more likely, idiotic, concerning one of the Shoah’s most famous victims, Anne Frank: Did she acknowledge her white privilege?Their response is “Slam Frank,” which follows the staging of an “intersectional, multi-ethnic, genderqueer, decolonized, anti-capitalist, hyper-empowering Afro-Latin hip-hop musical” — that’s a direct quote from the press release — and generated both avid praise and controversy in its premiere last year.In the show, now having another off-Broadway run at the Orpheum Theatre, our teenage heroine is still trapped in an attic in Amsterdam with her parents and sister and another family, keeping a diary while hiding from the Nazis. But she’s now also a rapper who identifies as a Latina, calling herself Anita. Her mother, Edith, is black, and her dad, Otto, is neurodivergent, as he reminds us repeatedly, also using terms like attention deficit disorder and “auditory processing disorder,” which I didn’t know was a thing until I looked it up.Anne’s crush, Peter, now wants to identify as non-binary. And since “Slam Frank” is presented as a musical within a musical, we meet the artistic director of a theater company, a preening, self-consciously woke chap who tries to kick things off with a land acknowledgment but loses his notes naming the Native American tribe he wants to honor. “Whoever they are,” he eventually intones, “they were here first, and we are here now, and shame on us. Okay? Good?”It’s an amusing bit, and when I attended a recent preview, it further piqued my curiosity about the show, which I hadn’t seen during its previous run. Would “Slam Frank” ridicule the excesses of progressivism or try to defend and justify them? Would it by chance point out that, with all the focus on identity politics in those quarters, antisemitism tends to get little attention, with Jews more often cast as oppressors?The answer to the second question is a big fat no. For the first, it’s both, often at the expense of acuity. Throughout the show, Messrs. Fox and Silensky seem to alternately (and simultaneously, at times) mock and endorse progressive views and tropes, and the result is an exercise in performative chutzpah that offers few insights and mostly feels benign — that is, until its last roughly 20 minutes, the biggest source of the aforementioned controversy.The show’s creators initially insisted that this portion not be included in reviews, then amended that demand, wisely, asking that surprises be kept intact, explaining, “The last act is designed to leave audiences in a state of shock and awe, disoriented, provoked, and compelled to continue discussing the performance long after the curtain falls.”For me, the segment was most jarring for how reductive it is, addressing one of the most maddeningly complex and enduringly tragic conflicts of our time with a specious comparison that would have shocked me had I not already been so familiar with it. If this is intended as parody, as some have suggested, I didn’t get the joke.The cast of ‘Slam Frank.’ Shawn SalleyOtherwise, the talented young cast, under Sam LaFrage’s bubbly direction, generally mines the broad, obvious humor adroitly. Olivia Bernábe’s Anita is a pert dynamo with a supple, shiny singing voice; Amelia Louise Barr does deft double duty as both her cripplingly shy sister and her brassier “Abuela,” as Anita naturally calls her grandmother. Austen Horne brings winning sass to Edith’s facial expressions and her lines; “Every woman is a Jew hiding in her own attic,” she sings at one point.But the funniest element of “Slam Frank” by far is its logo. Displayed on the playbill cover and prominently in Adam Koch’s set, it’s modeled on the famous one for “Hamilton,” an obvious source of inspiration for the newer musical in its structure and score: The figure of a girl stands atop a Star of David, where the sixth point would normally be, holding up a book triumphantly.Of course, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster hit examined history and approached identity in ways that were genuinely daring, stressing our heritage as a nation of immigrants and presenting a nascent America that looked more like our country does today. Messrs. Fox and Sinensky, in contrast, press buttons to provoke and please modern audiences without really saying or doing anything original. That’s not bravery; it’s opportunism.

‘Slam Frank’ Mistakes Opportunism for Bravery

‘Slam Frank’ Mistakes Opportunism for Bravery

More from the New York Sun

O’Neill’s ‘Hairy Ape’ Still Speaks to an Age of Inequality

U.S. Recalls B-1 Bombers From U.K. Air Base After Men Allegedly Plotting Attack Released

The Real Reason Cowboy Boots Found Their Footing

British Greens Bring Back ‘Zionism Is Racism’

NASA Races Nuclear Power to the Moon – and Mars

Trump Announces ‘Super Intelligence Force’ To Fight Threat He Calls ‘Hoax’

The ‘Missteps’ That Made Sylvester Stallone

Angry Voters Don’t Trust Democrats To Fix Economy as Trump Polls Tank

More from the New York Sun

O’Neill’s ‘Hairy Ape’ Still Speaks to an Age of Inequality

U.S. Recalls B-1 Bombers From U.K. Air Base After Men Allegedly Plotting Attack Released

The Real Reason Cowboy Boots Found Their Footing

British Greens Bring Back ‘Zionism Is Racism’

NASA Races Nuclear Power to the Moon – and Mars

Trump Announces ‘Super Intelligence Force’ To Fight Threat He Calls ‘Hoax’

The ‘Missteps’ That Made Sylvester Stallone

Angry Voters Don’t Trust Democrats To Fix Economy as Trump Polls Tank