Frank Bodeen has just become single, and now that he’s free of Mia, his ex, he’s looking for love. That’s the central scenario of the Swedish musical Frankie by writer-director Peter Bark, the author of Z. It’s the story of Frank’s romantic dreams, fueled by the songs of his namesake and idol, Frank Sinatra, and how he eventually finds a new standard of masculinity and manages to turn his life around.
The show premiered at the Tao Theater, Stockholm, in 1997, and was then revived at the same venue the following year with a revised script for a smaller cast. It was revived again for an amateur performance in 2017, still in Stockholm. The main difficulty in talking about it is that no script is available, for any of the three productions, and there is precious little other information, except for the vital fact that the one available photograph from the 1998 version shows a spanking scene.
We don’t even know which character it is who gets spanked: the cast list gives the actors’ names, but doesn’t match them to their roles. It’s clear that Andreas Tottie was Frankie, reprising his role from the 1997 production, but what about his tottie, Mette Adolfsson? My guess is that she played Åsa, a girl whom Frank is too shy to talk to when he meets her, but who then continually turns up in his daydreams, as if she is trying to help him visualize and process his fantasies. If that’s right, then one of those fantasies evidently entailed this:
Here’s the girl who played Åsa in 2017:
Was she spanked too, or was the script revised again? Time may tell…
Vanilla Spanking 