“Yours, Anne”: The Musical “Diary of Anne Frank”

Anne Frank was born in Germany on June 12, 1929. Shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, she and her sister, and both parents, fled to Amsterdam, but were soon endangered there too, as Holland fell to the Nazis. Unable to leave the country, the Frank family, along with four others, spent 25 months hidden in a tiny annex of rooms above her father’s office. After being betrayed to the Gestapo, Anne, her family, and the others living with them were arrested and deported in late 1944. In March of 1945, nine months after she was arrested and about a month before the end of the War in Europe, Anne Frank died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She was 15 years old.

Miep Gies, one of Mr. Frank’s employees who sustained the occupants of the annex with food and supplies, had discovered Anne’s diary, left behind in the ransacked rooms. After the war, Gies passed it on to Otto Frank, Anne’s father, who was the only member of the immediate family to survive. Encouraged by early reaction to the diary, Mr. Frank decided to have it published in 1947.

Transcending all racial, national and linguistic barriers, ANNE FRANK: THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL grew into an international classic, and a perennial best-seller. The Frank house in Amsterdam became a museum, visited by hundreds of thousands of people each year, in Anne’s name, organizations have arisen in Amsterdam, Basel, London and New York, dedicated to the plea for tolerance and cry against bigotry that her story inspires. The diary has been retold as Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway play; a Hollywood movie; several television mini-series; and even an animated film. In the world of music, the Anne Frank story has inspired two ballets, a one woman opera, three orchestral works, a jazz composition, and no less than four musicals – two of which arrived Off-Broadway a decade apart from each other (YOURS, ANNE being the first, in 1985.)

The concept for “Yours, Anne” was inspired by a chance meeting in 1973 between librettist Enid Futterman and her friend and renowned actress and vocal artist Andrea Marcovicci.  Futterman collaborated with composer Michael Cohen and in 1975 presented their score and lyrics to Otto Frank.  While initially skeptical,  as the work was refined he approved it and it saw its Off -Broadway debut October 10, 1985 where it enjoyed a six month run. It has subsequently been produced throughout the US and in many other countries including Canada, England, Belgium and Japan.