The Composer Making a Hip-Hop Musical About Anne Frank

He wrote a rap, heavily indebted to Eminem’s “8 Mile,” in the voice of a feisty teen-ager whose hip-hop bravado has been dampened only slightly by the fact that she and her family happen to be crammed into an attic, hoping not to be discovered and killed: “When this hiding’s over, I’ll be in demand, with my prose tighter / And if survival’s not the plan, I’ll be a ghost writer.” He decided that his Anne Frank would not be white but rather Latina, having grown up in “the barrios of Frankfurt,” with a closeted father who loves to remind people that he is neurodivergent; she has a crush on Peter, a fellow-refugee whose gender identity is the subject of an inspirational acoustic-guitar ballad called “Non-Binary.” Fox kept writing songs and began to enlist collaborators, all of whom had to decide whether they wanted to risk their careers by signing on. When one user asked why on earth Anne Frank would speak Spanish, Fox wrote, with mock exasperation, “Because she’s an immigrant?” When another noted that one of the songs sounded a bit like Kanye West, who had recently added to his infamy by promoting a website that sold swastika T-shirts, Fox replied, “Unfortunately we wrote this song BEFORE we discovered that he is monetizing and appropriating Jain & Hindu symbols.” Just about every day, when people wondered if it was all a put-on, Fox responded with a joke that turned out not to be a joke after all, and which turned into a kind of mission statement: “ ‘Slam Frank’ is a real musical.” The New York Times described the show as “clever” and “gleefully provocative”; the London Times called it “the most brilliant new musical in New York City,” and voiced a hope that it could “save Broadway.” The bad reviews helped, too: Fox News called it “grotesque,” and someone started an online petition that labelled the production “deeply offensive” and demanded that it be cancelled; the petition provided a useful suggestion of controversy, even though fewer than a thousand people signed it.

Author: Kelefa Sanneh

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