Rocky Paterra, Austen Horne, Amelia Louise Barra, Alex Lewis, and Olivia Bernabé in Slam Frank. Photo: Shawn Salley Photography

Slam Frank, the satirical musical that has just moved into the storied Orpheum Theatre from last year’s run at Asylum NYC and is playing until the end of November, seems to have taken to heart the old theater adage “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.” Inspired by an online debate over whether conversations about Anne Frank should include her white privilege, the show ridicules left-wing identity politics by imagining a well-intentioned progressive theatrical troupe producing a woke version of The Diary of Anne Frank, the stage adaptation of Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl.

Though the show-within-a-show concept seems straightforward, in execution it is anything but. In this “enlightened” retelling, each character represents (or, in the course of the play, discovers they represent) a different oppressed group: Anne is a Latinx immigrant; her mother, Edith, a Black woman; her father, Otto, a neurodivergent gay man; Peter a nonbinary queer teen; his mother, Mrs. van Daan, a repressed woman; and Margot, Anne’s sister, the token Jew. The one exception is cis-gendered, straight, neurotypical Mr. van Daan, representing the patriarchy. Predictably, the group, so intent on inclusiveness, loses sight of Anne Frank’s story, and the faux production sends a message antithetical to the book.

First, the good news. There is a startling amount of creativity on display. The performers commit to their characters, no matter how ridiculous, sing quite well, and display terrific comic timing. The songs are full of clever lyrics. Several rap numbers a la Hamilton manage to imitate some of that show’s lyrical complexity and clever rhymes, no mean feat.

And there are many funny moments, from the opening land acknowledgment to the nonsensical yellow stars Sarah Lockwood has worked into the costumes to the bagels on Indigenous Moses’s staff to the strong-women video montage during the song “Herstory” that starts with famous historical figures and (after peppering in pop culture icons whose identity escaped me) ends with multiple slides of Anne Hathaway. Zach Lobel’s video design combines nicely with Adam Koch’s multi-level set and Jamie Roderick’s energetic lighting, offering a dizzying variety of setups in what could have been a claustrophobic space. Director Sam LaFrage puts together a number of fun sequences, including the show’s highlight: Anne recounting her family’s immigration story through the “jungles of Germany.” Running jokes, like the vilification of a portion of the audience or players’ confusion over whether they are critiquing Nazi Germany or contemporary America, tie together the often disparate action.

There ends the good news. Unfortunately, Slam Frank is even more muddled than the play-within-a-play writers Andrew Fox and Joel Sinensky are satirizing. For one thing, the show’s perspective is constantly shifting. At times it belongs to the Director (a very funny John Anker Bow, who doubles as Mr. van Daan), at times the play-within-a-play’s characters, or the actors playing those characters, and at times… who can tell? Without narrative consistency, the satire is rendered toothless.

The writers’ willingness to sacrifice anything for a joke also drains both the power of their social commentary and the joy of their drama. Unlike more successful satires—say, Airplane with its wall-to-wall jokes poking fun of 1970s disaster movies, or Veep with its laser focus on America’s broken political system—Slam Frank is indiscriminate when pursuing laughs. Characters are inconsistent: sometimes aware they are in a play, sometimes unaware; sometimes prioritizing their progressive purity, sometimes tossing it aside (Edith, for instance, insists on allyship until there’s a chance to get a laugh by scoffing at Otto’s ever-growing list of neurodivergent diagnoses). The role of woke intolerance in killing art is unclear when stupid artistic choices, like anachronistic references to podcasts and fidget spinners, seem just as responsible.

What, exactly, is the show making fun of? Progressives’ uninformed, performative activism? Poorly conceived and executed theater? Actors unwilling to commit to characters? Musicals writ large? Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton? (Unlikely, but why does Slam Frank repeatedly parody that show’s hip-hop numbers?) Or perhaps the very small subset of successful but untalented left-wing-for-appearances-only musical theater creators who aren’t Lin-Manuel Miranda. Satire is most effective when most pointed; this show, with targets everywhere, feels less like social commentary and more like a burn list.

Still, Slam Frank’s greater sin, perhaps, is stasis. Five minutes in, I was afraid I had seen everything the writers had to offer; little in the next two hours convinced me otherwise. The premise is appropriately ridiculous but it can only carry the show so far. Yes, there are funny bits, but they could have fit in a fifteen-minute show and still left room for intermission.

Moreover, the show commits the worst of all sins in entertainment: bad timing. The moment to ridicule DEI advocates as dangerous cancel-culture warriors who are making overblown claims about the danger of fascism seems to have passed. There are valid criticisms of the left and of PC (sorry, woke) police, and Slam Frank can be biting when it targets the left wing’s rising anti-semitism, intolerance, purity tests, and demonization of opponents. But it does so by demonizing its opponents, leaving me–an audience member probably more aligned with the writers’ views than not–feeling lectured to. And focusing on liberal overreaction to rising authoritarianism in fall 2026 feels like complaining about undercooked chicken after your luxury ocean liner has struck an iceberg. Let’s hope, when the show is remounted twenty years from now, that political reform has eliminated corruption; restored our social safety net; eliminated racism, sexism, xenophobia, antisemitism, LGBTQIA+ prejudice, and other forms of scapegoating; redistributed wealth to redress centuries of injustice; and reestablished our democracy, and wokeness is the greatest danger we face. Then Slam Frank will be hailed as a prophetic masterpiece.