Our Fall 2002 show was the acclaimed drama, The Diary of Anne Frank.
Performances of The Diary of Anne Frank were 8-16 November 2002, including a special performance for a school audience.
The cast included: Alan Barbacoff as Mr. Otto Frank, Sarah Belliveau as Anne Frank, Carolyn Blais as Margot Frank, Keith Briggs as Mr. Kraler, Rosemary DeGregorio as Mrs. Van Daan, Merle Gordon as Mrs. Edith Frank, John Greene as Mr. Van Daan, Kathy Rapino as Miep Gies, Robert Savage as Peter Van Daan, and Larry Segel as Mr. Dussel. As the Police, we had Stephan Belyea, Michael Cuddire, Ginny Ford, Marie Grace, and Shawn Havican. And Arielle Rawding appeared as a Child.
The director was David Kristin. He directed an SRO production last year of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the Winthrop Playhouse.
Born on June 12, 1929, Anne Frank was a German-Jewish teenager who was forced to go into hiding during the Holocaust. She and her family, along with four others, spent 25 months during World War II in an annex of rooms above her father’s office in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. After being betrayed to the Nazis, Anne, her family, and the others living with them were arrested and deported to Nazi concentration camps. Nine months after she was arrested, Anne Frank died of typhus in March of 1945 at Bergen-Belsen. She was fifteen years old. Her diary, saved during the war by one of the family’s helpers, Miep Gies, was first published in 1947. Today, her diary has been translated into 67 languages and is one of the most widely read books in the world. The book is a testament to the strength of the human spirit, even in the face of unmitigated harshness and brutality.
The play is based on the diary. We presented the revised edition of the play adapted by Wendy Kesselman, presented on Broadway in 1997. The original version is by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, and was first produced in 1955. The revised version of the play includes additional material that was excluded from the first published version of the diary, as well as information discovered about the families in more recent years.
For more information on Anne Frank, visit these sites:
http://www.annefrank.com/index1.html
http://www-th.phys.rug.nl/~ma/annefrank.html
Theatre Company of Saugus 