New York Youth Theater's Anne Frank a winner

The Diary of Anne Frank, New York Youth Theater, Inc., 593 Park Ave., 7th floor, New York City, $12. Performances Fridays at 7 p.m., Saturdays at 2 and 7 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m., through Feb. 6. Reservations encouraged. (212) 888-0696.

The production of The Diary of Anne Frank by the New York Youth Theater, Inc. is well-done and a bargain at only $12. Now in its ninth season, the non-profit New York Youth Theater continues its tradition of bringing important works meaningful to the lives of young people to its newly renovated performance space on the seventh floor of the Central Presbyterian Church on Park Ave. at 64th Street.

I accompanied three 12-year-old girls who know more about Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears than Anne Frank, but that turned out to give the story even more pathos.

Watching these three fix their hair, apply more glitter to their faces and giggle about Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys during the intermission made it that much more painful to imagine a 13-year-old Anne Frank coming into young womanhood herself, confined to that small attic, with no privacy and precious little to giggle about.

Ronette Levenson, 16, is a standout as Anne Frank in an all-around strong cast. Her grandparents are in fact Holocaust survivors, and she dedicates her performance to them and "to the survival of hope."

Levenson was Anne. It isn't until the climatic moment when the Nazi soldiers can be heard breaking in downstairs that you suddenly realize just how completely absorbed you've become in the lives of these eight Jews hiding out in 1942 Amsterdam.

Jay Greenburg as Mr. Frank was excellent - he cried real tears in the final scene and he wasn't the only one. One of the girls I came with said she had started to cry in the opening scene when Otto Frank, the only survivor of the eight, returns to the attic after the war and finds a scarf Anne had given him.

That is an indication of the impact of this production and of this story that still moves us more than 50 years later.

Another cast member to watch is Jeffrey Correira as Peter Van Daan, the teenage son of the friends of the Franks who are hiding out with them.

He successfully conveys the awkwardness of a boy his age dealing with the smart and feisty Anne, hiding his insecurities behind brusqueness until they form a special bond that gives them strength against the petty irritations inside the attic and the horror waiting for them outside.

The New York Youth Theater, since its 1991 inception, has presented a wide range of family-oriented productions from new musicals like Ride with Me to Freedom, a story of Harriet Tubman; to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and familiar favorites like E.B. White's Charlotte's Web.

Time Out New York named the NYYT "one of the city's strongest children's theaters.

- Carolyn Rummel