The Senior Times Online

Legendary journal comes to life on stage
Preview: The Diary of Anne Frank at the Segal
The Leanor and Alvin Segal Theatre of The Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts launches its new season this October with the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Diary of Anne Frank.
Written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, and adapted by Wendy Kesselman, the play is an iconic dramatization of the legendary journals of a Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War II.
Directed by Marcia Kash, this world-renowned play movingly details the tension between the inhuman darkness of the Nazis and the incandescent humanity of its heroine.
The diary itself is as acclaimed as the play. In the introduction to its first American edition, Eleanor Roosevelt called the journal “one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings I have ever read. ”

Frank’s diary chronicles 25 months spent with her family and four others, hiding from the Nazis in rooms above her father ’s office. They were eventually captured by the Nazis and, in 1945, nine months after her arrest, Anne died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen. She was 15.
First published in 1947, the diary’s popularity led to the theatrical adaptation, which opened on Broadway in 1955.
The Diary of Anne Frank runs October 14 to November 4 at the Leanor and Alvin Segal Theatre, 5170 Côte-Ste-Catherine Rd. Info: 514-739-2301 or www.saidyebronfman.org.