The New Yorker: The Composer Making a Hip-Hop Musical About Anne Frank
Andrew Fox, the creator of “Slam Frank,” was disillusioned with American theatre. Then a viral debate about white privilege gave him a new sense of purpose.
December 4, 2025
A few years ago, Andrew Fox was struck by a transcendently bad idea. He would turn the story of Anne Frank into a satirical hip-hop musical: intersectional, inclusive, and inane. Fox was a theatre-loving composer who had grown dispirited by the industry in general, and by humorless and preachy productions in particular. His gloomy outlook was not improved by his habit of spending hours on social media, which is where, in 2022, he came across a debate over whether or not Anne Frank was the beneficiary of “white privilege”—notwithstanding her Jewish identity, for which she was hunted down by Nazi soldiers and shipped to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died, in 1945, at the age of fifteen. Like many viral online debates, this one was rather one-sided: most people seemed to agree that the idea was ridiculous, including the celebrity-gossip site TMZ, which covered the controversy and rendered its own dismissive verdict in the form of a woozy-face emoji.
