It’s hard to make an Off-Broadway show go viral — and even harder to sell tickets. Yet Slam Frank, the controversial, conversation-starting new musical reimagining the story of Anne Frank as an intersectional, multi-ethnic, gender-queer, Afro-Latin hip-hop musical, is somehow doing both.
The concept alone made headlines across the political aisle when the show was first announced, but the its digital marketing across Instagram and TikTok has turned it into a minor sensation.
The show hails from provocateur-composer Andrew Fox and writer-co-creator Joel Sinensky, both of whom also currently star. Together, the pair have spearheaded an impressive social media strategy for Slam Frank that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of followers, millions of video views, and 33 of its first 36 performances selling out entirely.
We sat down with the duo for a look at their strategy in cultivating an audience for their audacious stage show, which has resulted in multiple Off-Broadway extensions.
DEADLINE: Slam Frank went viral before it even opened. What was the post or moment that sparked early interest?
ANDREW FOX: Around Christmas of 2024, I announced the project on my personal TikTok, which got around 100,000 views — nothing special. Exactly a month later, a small-time right-wing Instagram aggregator reposted it just as I was boarding an airplane to Los Angeles. By the time my plane landed, that repost had collected thousands of comments and hundreds of thousands of views. A few days later, we launched our official Instagram using that same video, which, along with its captioned repost, has a combined nine million views.
ALEX LEWIS: The video that really launched us into the zeitgeist was our very first video. We showed various actresses who have portrayed Anne Frank in the past and asked a straightforward question: What do they all have in common? The answer to that question is that all the actresses pictured were white. The message of that video is absolutely rooted in the questions and themes we explore in the show.
When we released our first video, we invited the audience to be part of the game. Go to our comments and you’ll understand what I mean. Once we hit the ground running with that and we all had fun with it… that’s what changed the game for us.
DEADLINE: How quickly did online buzz start turning into sold-out shows?
FOX: Well, first we had to schedule and announce a show. As the attention snowballed, we realized that we’d have to book a concert venue. After many rejections, we found a venue and announced our two concerts on March 18. By March 19 we’d sold all our tickets.
LEWIS: We made content on our pages for months, and we decided to put tickets for our concert reading back in June online. We sold the reading out in a mere 36 hours— faster than our venue had ever sold anything out!
DEADLINE: Would you say your marketing strategy was more by design or by happy accident — taking advantage of organic chaos?
FOX: We knew from the beginning of this project that social media would be a huge component — and that if we just advertised this show in a very straightforward sort of way, we could get a lot of eyeballs.
Once it started going viral, it was just like any good improv scene — make a lot of offers, listen, and keep adding information. When you’re on the internet, there are so many feedback mechanisms and so much interactivity that it would be stupid not to incorporate that chaos and utilize it. The fans gave us catchphrases, they gave us content, and they really helped build the world and shape how we present the show. A ton of our catchphrases emerged organically from interaction with them and through workshopping what they did and didn’t respond to. We also had the benefit of all of these TikTok formats to pastiche and a whole play’s worth of lines and lore to draw on.
LEWIS: It’s hard to say where one ends and the other begins. I don’t think either of us anticipated quite how viral our first videos would go, but we always knew the message could continue by responding to what was already laid out. What really drove the initial engagement was the doubt that the show was real; people didn’t believe that there was a progressive theater company like ours ready to tell the story of Anita Franco and her journey from the barrios of Frankfurt. Then, when we started sharing clips from the show, it created this whole new conversation. Not only is this thing real, but is it good?
DEADLINE: Andrew, you’ve been labeled as everything from “provocateur” to “internet troll.” Given that so much of Slam Frank is about identity, which label feels most accurate to you?
FOX: I don’t know how willing I am to adopt any single label. That said, I’ve seen some great descriptions of me. One commenter in particular really nailed me with “You’ve got to really love musicals to hate musicals as much as this guy does.”
DEADLINE: You’re now stepping into the show yourself. Does being on stage change how you experience your own storytelling?
FOX: Being on stage absolutely changes my experience of the show, particularly when it comes to seeing the show and planning rewrites. My writer’s experience of the show focuses on rhythm, pacing, clarity, and shaping the audience experience. Onstage, the show is much more about trajectories. Acting a role yourself, you become very conscious of when a trajectory is stalled or rerouted. Both for your own track, but also for the whole ensemble, which, especially in this show, needs to be treated like its own organism.
Sitting in a chair at the back of the theater, it can be very easy to get lost in the weeds and forget the responsibility you have to the actors to give them a roller coaster track that takes them from the beginning to the end of the show. The more inevitable and clear I can make their journeys, the more they can be their brilliant selves.
DEADLINE: You’ve attracted audiences from across the political spectrum, even internationally. What does that diversity of response tell you about where culture is right now?
FOX: It’s no secret that our culture has become atomized and siloed. While it’s nice to have your “safe spaces” from time to time, I don’t think that’s necessarily sustainable in a democracy where people need to have some sort of shared sense of reality.
Slam Frank is a very deliberately opaque creation, where you can never really be 100% sure what is real and what isn’t, or what angle the creative team is coming from. The layers of sincerity and irony — both for the social media and the live theatrical experience — grant a sort of permission for everyone to play along, regardless of where they’re coming from. And that means that you can get a lot of very different people from very different walks of life who are all participating in something together — and who now have at least one more thing in common.
LEWIS: In my opinion, it’s a bit of a spotlight on art itself and how it transcends beliefs. People have many views on what exactly the show represents and on the creative team’s political leanings, and these views are often at odds. In the same way, that’s kind of how our fanbase is, which I find incredibly exciting. People have been coming in and taking messages from the show that they find incredibly profound, that are diametrically opposed to what other people have taken away. All sorts of people love and hate the show for completely opposing reasons, and yet what the show does is bring those people in a room together to watch art and discuss it afterwards.
DEADLINE: How have you handled the show’s reception across different political or cultural groups?
FOX: I love seeing all the different responses and the ways in which people see their experience reflected back to them, and I think people would be shocked at how much they have in common. We get a lot of people who’ve never paid to see a musical before, all showing up to support this new work in development. It’s wild to go out into the lobby and see a Hasidic Jewish family standing next to a bunch of frat bros shotgunning beers — and then see the more traditional musical theater people trying to make sense of the cast of characters around them.
DEADLINE: Has online outrage ever made its way into a showing?
FOX: When we went into rehearsals, we had an entire plan for what to do if anyone attempted to forcibly stop the show, with an emergency plan to protect our cast and budgeting for a Broadway-style security team for each performance of our little show. So far, the audience has actually been much better behaved than we anticipated — downright buzzy and amiable on most nights. But knock on wood — we are keeping that security budget intact.
LEWIS: We have people walk out of the show from time to time and make a big show of it. As a theater enjoyer/performer, I find that annoying, and possibly because of all the crowd-work comedy that’s gotten big. But I know what we’re doing is pretty incendiary, and I was expecting that at some point, people would get mad or unwieldy in our audience.
DEADLINE: Have any moments during performances caught you off guard emotionally?
LEWIS: There’s a very intense moment towards the end of the show that receives a surprising amount of laughter. At first, it would drive me nuts because I was precious about it. “Stop, this is supposed to be intense.” But now I love that people laugh. I realized that we’re breaking people’s brains by the end of the show, so it’s very exciting to me now when we receive that laughter.
DEADLINE: How have you approached ticket pricing to keep the show accessible?
FOX: This one’s tricky because it’s such a small house that it’s tough to recoup your costs with affordable ticket prices. Still, we’ve added two tiers of $20 tickets — Rush tickets before the show, and then Standby tickets right at curtain to snatch any unclaimed seats. We’re also frequently sharing promo codes on our Instagram.
LEWIS: We stopped eating food.
DEADLINE: If you could change one thing about how you promoted the show online, what would it be?
LEWIS: I would personally show more clips from the actual show. It’s my opinion that it would actually attract more people, whereas most of the people on my team think it can stop people from buying tickets because they think you wouldn’t go since you’ve already seen content from it. I used to watch the bootleg of Avenue Q after school every day in California, and every time I’d get to New York City I’d buy a ticket to go back. Maybe that’s just me, but I think spoilers often can be helpful.
DEADLINE: How do you want people to feel walking out of Slam Frank?
FOX: The best reaction that a play can get is if you are so blown away that you have to go to the bar and talk about it with someone — or so stunned that you can’t speak at all.
