‘Slam Frank’ Co-Creator Andrew Fox on Making the Controversial Musical

Death-defying acts are usually performed at the circus, but watching the off-Broadway musical, Slam Frank, is like witnessing a handful of actors juggling scalpels while traversing a tightrope strung over a field of burning truck tires… and singing and dancing to some very catchy music.

The lead Wallenda of this production: Andrew Fox, who has created with Joel Sinensky one of the most daring, controversial and original musicals produced in a long time.

“Free speech is in the blood, baby,” says Fox, whose great-grandfather, Cook County, Illinois Superior Court Judge Samuel Epstein ruled that Henry Miller’s controversial 1934 autobiographical novel, Tropic of Cancer, could not be banned by Chicago bookstores.

In addition to composing the music and lyrics for Slam Frank — which were influenced by a wide range of artists, including Kanye West, Stephen Sondheim and Wilson Phillips — Fox frequently co-stars in the production. The plot: a progressive theater troupe that presents Anne Frank as a pansexual Latina with a Black mother, a neurodivergent gay father, an ultra-orthodox Jewish sister and a gender-fluid love interest as they hide from the Nazis with another family in an Amsterdam attic. (Fox plays the father of the other family, Mr. Van Daan.)

Inspired in part by a 2022 tweet that asked whether Frank ever acknowledged “her white privilege,” Slam Frank satirizes the often performative culture which produced that tweet, as well as a a word salad of terms and pronouns that the comedian Chris Rock described in his 2023 Netflix special, Selective Outrage, as “woke traps.” But what’s brilliant about the play — in addition to the songs and dialogue (Sinensky wrote the book) — is its refusal to clobber theatergoers with an explicit message.

As a result, Slam Frank, which is running through Dec. 28 at Asylum NYC in Manhattans Flatiron District, has amassed fans and critics of all political and cultural stripes.

“We have people going, ‘This is left-wing propaganda,’ and we have people going, ‘This is right-wing propaganda,’” Fox says. “I have had people accuse me of making anti-Zionist propaganda. Others have said it’s Zionist propaganda. Other comments I’ve gotten: ‘He’s fascist,’ ‘He’s on the dirtbag left,’ ‘He’s a disillusioned progressive.’” And they’re all coming to the same show.

Fox adds that it doesn’t occur to those drawing such conclusions that, “One, people with different political beliefs can work together to make a work of art. Two, it is possible for a work of art to not have a cohesive political outlook. Three, it is possible for a work of art to contain many viewpoints and to support or tear down many viewpoints. It has never even occurred to them that art can be apolitical because we’re in the era of the personal is political.”

Slam Frank opened in September and has gained significant momentum over the last couple of months. It is now playing to full houses at Asylum NYC, but capacity there is just 150 people there, and Fox — who discussed the musical on a recent Zoom call — says the production will move to a larger space in the new year. “Barring some horrible catastrophe, we will be in a theater or theaters in 2026,” he says.

Did you know this was going to be a volatile production going in?

Absof–kinglutely.

At any point did you and Joel say, “Are we really going to do this?”

We never paused and said, “Are we really going to do this.” We were hurtling towards it. There was very much an attitude of we have nothing to lose. We’re both at the point of quitting and changing our careers, so let’s blow up the building as we’re walking away from it.

Also, part of it is if you’re reacting against an artistic environment where everyone is so clearly acting out of fear – fear of being disliked or having their intentions misread.

And when one of us would get cold feet and try to change costume pieces or words, the actors came back and said, “F—k you. I’m doing it, and you can’t stop me.” And it was almost always the person who was most likely to be offended by it. It was like if you assemble a group of Marines, it doesn’t matter if one of them gets scared, the rest of them are going to say, “Sack up, pussy, let’s go!” That’s what our team did.

In interviews, you’ve talked about “forced diversity,” and its connection to woke culture. Do you mind elaborating?

The word “diversity” is one of those words that’s meaningless because the context — who’s saying it, and what they mean by it — can go in so many different directions. Do you mean true diversity? Do you mean demographically representative casting, or do you mean this group and this group only. And for what purpose?

It becomes very clear to people — especially when they’re watching Disney movies, advertisements or low-quality Netflix slop — that frequently when people are trumpeting what they say is moral good, it is actually a marketing gimmick or decision.

There are a lot of contemporary music and Broadway musical references in the show.

I’m a pop, rock, hip-hop guy, and frequently when you’re watching a Broadway musical that claims, “We’re pop rock, we’re hip-hop,” if you’ve ever experienced the real thing, you’re like, are you? Musical theater is very much a bubble, and a lot of the people working inside of it don’t realize the extent to which it’s a bubble. So, a lot of their music is a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox. There is nobody writing rap for musicals right now who’s influenced by Biggie Smalls. They’re being influenced by Lin-Manuel Miranda. They’re Xeroxing.

But our references — we’ve got early to middle period Kanye West. We’ve got Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights and Hamilton. We’ve got Once On This Island, the [Lynn] Ahrens and [Stephen] Flaherty musical. We have Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, and that gets pretty explicitly referenced in the show because it’s a major, major influence on us.

Pretty much anytime somebody makes a majority male historically accurate show with a lot of guns in it, I love it. So, Assassins and Dead Outlaw are big influences. What else do we have in there? There’s a lot of Jason Robert Brown. The show actually has an ongoing dig at Jason Robert Brown that runs through the show. He has has a very distinctive style heavily influenced by Stephen Sondheim meets Paul Simon, Shawn Colvin and middle period Joni Mitchell. So, whenever you hear that piano pattern ‘dun ga gat, ga gun ga gat, ga gun ga gat, ga gun,’ that’s Jason Robert Brown trying to make the sound of a guitar strumming on a piano. He did Songs for a New World, Parade, The Last Five Years. Those are his three biggest, most influential pieces.

We also have a good amount of Stephen Schwartz: Wicked and The Prince of Egypt. Wilson Phillips and Vonda Shepard are in there as well. [Charles] Strouse and [Lee] Adams, who wrote Bye Bye Birdie, but also the All in the Family theme. Although we cut the song that they influenced. It’s a little bit of everything.

What is important to you when you’re composing numbers for a musical?  

There’s this false belief that the way musicals work is when the emotion becomes too big, the character must break into song. That’s bulls–t, and that’s how you make a bad musical. What a song really does is give structure to a thought, an idea or a moment. So we approached everything in this show by asking, “What structure that we can give to this idea, and what would this fictional theater company make in this place?”

So, half of the show turns into celebratory anthems that have come to dominate pop and musical theater. I call it the “This is me” song: [Sara Bareilles‘] “Brave,” [Katy Perry’s] “Firework” and [Lady Gaga‘s] “Born This Way” — anthem after anthem. Not to say those are bad songs, but once you’ve heard a thousand of them, you’re like, I get it, you’re you.

And frequently, when people are making music in a comedic setting they think that the fact that the song exists at all is funny. One of the rules we set for ourselves is that every song we have in this show has to be at least as good as the thing that it’s parodying. If we’re making a feminist ballad, it has to be a f–king killer, catchy ballad. I have to see every woman in the room bobbing her head to it and dancing along before the song twists on them.

Have the Hamilton people given you any grief over the resemblance of the Slam Frank logo to theirs?

We did not hear from the Hamilton people, but there was a Jewish law student who lives in Toronto, who contacted me pretending to be the lawyer who worked on the trademark. She was threatening me and trying to shut me down.

When I got her phone number and called her and was like, “Hey, it’s Andrew Fox from Slam Frank. What’s up?” She had this tone in her voice of, “Oh my god, this is so scary.”  I find this is an ongoing pattern. The minute you contact people who are willing to break basic ethics and truth in order to shut down or sabotage a show, they start acting like they’re being harassed.

You call and say, “We found out that you don’t own the rights to this, so you’re threatening us for no reason.” And they go, “You need to stop this phone call right now. You are harassing me.” No, you’re harassing me. I’m responding.”

Wow.

There was one person who accused us of stifling free speech just because we said, “Hey, please don’t post spoilers in your review.” And then they served us with the beginnings of a SLAPP lawsuit to stifle our speech. I probably shouldn’t have said that, but who gives a shit. I’m speaking as myself individually and not as a representative of Slam Frank.

You’ve said you like that the ambiguity of Slam Frank is creating these different perceptions and opinions.

What people really don’t understand in this country is the extent to which most people actually agree with each other. They may not come from the same core principles, or they might not arrive at the exact same policy or same rhetoric, but most people have a tremendous amount in common. We crafted Slam Frank as a three-dimensional object. I can’t give them away, but there are very evocative moments with symbols onstage that, based on your life experience and ideology, will give you different messages. Two people with completely different politics and life experiences will laugh at the same thing, and each will think, “Those other people they don’t get it, but I got it.” It doesn’t occur to them that something can just be funny or shocking.  

The audience I saw it with were really enjoying it. I did not see anybody huffing or walkng out.

We should get you back for one of the shows that has the huffers and puffers. Some people just walk out, and that’s great. There were a few times where people have waited until silences to walk out so they can make a huff, and then there was one night —  I wasn’t present, but cast members told me that two women in the front row stood up at a transition in the middle of a song, pointed at the actors and said, “How dare you!” I love that.

And on Reddit theater threads — this tells you a lot about theater fans and how closed their world is. They’ll write something like, “I’ve heard rumors that sometimes when people walk out, the actors call attention to it, and that is so abusive and disrespectful.” I’m like, ever go to a comedy club? Go to a one-person show in a small theater. That’s how things work.

Will the actors call out somebody?

It’s not really calling out. The way the space works, it’s very difficult to exit or even go to the bathroom without everybody seeing you. And especially because we are a show within a show, there are some moments where the only truthful thing for us to do is to acknowledge the thing that all of us are experiencing. We’re not saying, “How dare you walk out of our show!” I knew I was writing a show people were going to walk out of, and they have every right to walk out of it. You’re not supposed to say that in theater because you’re all supposed to be supporting each other. No, if I’m not having a good time I get the f–k out of there because there are a million better things I could be doing.

I read a comment about the show that Slam Frank would have been relevant two or three years ago but is not today. What’s your reaction?

There’s a great memoryholing going on right now. Regardless of what you think its origins are, its intentions and what it achieved, I think we can all agree that from 2013 to 2023, we lived through an extremely strange and bizarre moment in American history —especially if you were working in the arts, academia, the nonprofit sector or journalism.

The last 10 years of American life fundamentally changed all of our institutions, our relationships to each other, the political alignments of both parties. Our politics split around gender lines and did a million other things. And the minute we began to exit that time, everyone started working very hard to pretend that they were never part of it and that it never happened. So there are all these people going well yes, all of these things happened, but it has calmed down in the last two years. Why are you still talking about it?

Yeah, try that with anything else. “Hey, formalized segregation is over. Why are you still writing a play about segregation.” “Hey, it’s 1976, why are you still making movies about the Vietnam War?” “It’s 1974, why are you making a play about the [Hollywood] blacklist?” There are a lot of people who were the worst participants in a lot of excesses who are now very invested in making sure that we never examine them. Also, there are a lot of people who think it’s still not happening. It doesn’t have political power anymore, but it’s still happening. If slavery still echoes in 2025, surely whatever was happening in 2022 can still echo in 2025.

Do you think the minefield of woke terminology and thought is clearing?

I’m loathe to give names to things. Once you name a thing, at least in the artistic world, people can lock you down. I call it, “This thing that some people call woke.” We’re no longer in a space where saying a very normal thing or doing a very normal thing will immediately ruin your life.

You said that “this thing that people call ‘woke’” doesn’t have political power anymore. Do you think that the current administration was a catalyst?

Marc Maron had probably the best quote about it which was, “Congratulations, you’ve annoyed everybody into fascism.” I think a certain number of people came to the conclusion that maybe there wasn’t actually a force pulling people towards the right. Maybe there was a force driving people away.

Policy is not terribly interesting to me in an artistic sense. I don’t know anything beyond how this project is being received, and I will tell you that in early 2024, when we were showing songs from this, people were acting like it was the most radioactive thing — parts of the show that everybody applauds for and loves now. The same song that got our show kicked out of the BMI musical theater writing workshop is now the song that people on Reddit go, “It feels kind of soft and dated.” That’s a transformation that happened in a year. I don’t think it got soft. I think it is because the room we presented it in was ready to get offended by anybody touching anything. That’s a musical theater room.

You’re clearly a very witty writer and a funny guy. You must have comedy heroes.

One of the things I really love about stand-up comedy is that with every other art form you can get away with some level of bulls–t. With Stand-up comedy you’re in front of a fucking brick wall with a microphone. If you aren’t making people laugh, you’re a failure. And you’ve got to make them laugh in Brooklyn, in Kansas City and in f–king Peoria.

In 2022, I said I need to see what’s going on in comedy because that’s the only reliable indicator I have of what’s going on in the world of what the audiences actually care about. And the gulf between what was happening in stand-up comedy and what was happening in my world was so enormous. Some major influences are Bill Burr, Michelle Wolf, Ryan Long — this show would not exist without Ryan Long and Danny Polishchuk’s work on YouTube. And Jad Sleiman, the owner of the Bushwick Comedy Club.

They are masters of this thing where they get you to agree with them, and then they make you very uncomfortable with what agreeing with them means. And I think that’s a lot of what Slam Frank does. We go hey, we all believe this, everybody starts applauding and chuckling, and then we take it one more step. Then they go, “Whoa!” And then you have to seduce them all over again.