The new musical started in June 2025 with a staged reading, which led to a developmental run at Asylum NYC in September. Before and during Slam Frank’s run, its creators effectively drummed up publicity with posts on Instagram and TikTok that flaunted the show’s progressive bona fides, without letting on — as Slam Frank itself never does — that the whole thing is satire. In a pinned post from January 2025, Fox opines, “Our world has been getting more and more diverse, but our Holocaust narratives have not been able to keep up.”
The musical is outrageously offensive to basically every group. But somehow, Slam Frank became a hit. In early October, the former New York Times critic Ben Brantley proclaimed, via X, that “the already notorious little musical Slam Frank may be the most important new show around.” In late October, a Times review by Laura Collins-Hughes called it “gleefully provocative.” By mid-December, Fox had been profiled in The New Yorker, framed as an impish visionary, and Slam Frank’s run, originally scheduled for just three weeks, had been extended twice. The showrunners intend to restage the musical later this year; in the meantime, the team is recording a cast album. A Kickstarter, launched to finance that project, hit its original goal of thirty thousand dollars after just one day.
In the decade since Miranda reenvisioned the story of America’s founding as an immigrant narrative with a hip-hop score and a diverse cast, a flurry of musicals has sought to recreate Hamilton’s success by using its template, inflecting history with a modern, progressive sensibility. Many of these shows have enjoyed at least moderate commercial success; several — including Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s SIX (2017), about Henry VIII’s wives, and Shaina Taub’s Suffs (2022), about the American women’s suffrage movement — are still on Broadway or on tour.
These same imitators, however, have exposed Hamilton’s blueprint as acutely flawed. In a much more cheerful moment for American liberalism, Hamilton held out the hope that Americans could recuperate their fraught history by remaking it to conform with contemporary values. But the Hamilton ripoffs that rushed in to capitalize on this hope — and now Slam Frank, in satirizing progressive retelling — have instead revealed, in varying ways, that this aspiration is futile.
