Slam Frank

Hope to see you there.

We recorded this conversation about the play Slam Frank, written by Andrew Fox on December 11th, 2025, and planned to publish it that week to correspond with the closing of the show at Asylum NYC.

A few days later, 15 people were killed at a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach in Australia.

We shelved the episode in order to cover the massacre and decided not to run it after the show closed.

Now Slam Frank is back at the Orpheum Theater through November.

So we dusted off this conversation to play it for you now.

We hope you'll forgive any anachronisms.

Hello, and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast.

I'm your host, Mike Abrams, and today we have another amazing guest.

He was Gus on the U.S. National Tour 6 of Cats and is about to continue performances in Slam Frank the Musical, which is opening off-Broadway here in October.

So welcome, John Ankerbaugh.

Thank you for joining me.

Hey,

how are you? I'm excited because I did get to see Slam Frank at the asylum.

I saw the original, and I'm excited to go back.

Up close and personal.

Uh, The joke is you can't be tapping, the floors are thin.

But now there's an Anne Frank musical called Slam Frank.

No way, really? That's like a hip hop Anne Frank musical.

That's

Yeah, I can't wait to check this one out.

Moving on to Slam Frank, a musical comedy and one-act original off-Broadway show at the Orpheum Theater.

Synopsis.

In 2022, a viral tweet asked, did Anne Frank ever acknowledge her white privilege? End quote.

Slam Frank imagines what happens when a progressive theater company asks themselves that same question, applying the rules and tropes of progressive theater to the diary of Anne Frank.

Transcending all taste and decency, they transform Anne Frank's true story into an intersectional, multi-ethnic, genderqueer, decolonized, anti-capitalist, hyper-empowering Afro-Latin hip-hop musical.

Okay.

I

flop.

I assume you saw the Slam Frank promo.

The spray paint one? Because I've seen a lot of...

And Lenady Dineo reached out and was like...

That's insane.

She sent us the painting her nails emoji and we were grateful for that.

I keep trying to tell myself that I'm going to do a video explaining Slam Frank on the internet, and then I tell myself...

Oh, you're going

They did their sidebar.

There's like Slam Frank.

That's a real...

It's like a play in New York.