Anne Frank's Diary to Be Made Into a Musical

It might not seem the most obvious material for a song-and-dance number, but the Diary of Anne Frank will take center stage next month when a Spanish musical based on the most famous book about the Holocaust opens in Madrid.

Having been rewritten for films, plays and TV dramas, the story of the Jewish girl hiding out with her family in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam has never before been made as a musical. The Anne Frank Foundation, which jealously guards the rights to the diary - it once turned down Steven Spielberg when he wanted to make a film - has given its support. Jan Erik Dubbelman said: "This production respects the message of tolerance, within the tragedy, that we want to keep alive. Being in Spanish, it can also help to take the message of Anne Frank to Latin America."

The Spanish theatre group behind the musical has visited the tiny flat where Frank hid from the Nazis, seeking inspiration for their characters and performing some of the songs for members of the foundation. Isabella Castillo, a 13-year-old born in Cuba who has been chosen for the lead role, said she had been moved by the visit: "If you're doing a musical of the family and how they lived and the house and everything, I think it's very special, and a very important detail, to come to this house."

Frank wrote the diary while she and her family hid in a secret annexe behind a bookcase in a canal-side warehouse. For 25 months, she wrote down her experiences as a teenager - her love-hate relationship with her parents, spats with school friends, crushes on film stars - while in the background the war raged outside. The family was betrayed and arrested in August 1944 and Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945. Her father Otto was the only one to survive, and returned to Amsterdam after the war, where he discovered that her diary had been saved. First published in Dutch in 1947, it went on to be translated into 60 languages and has sold more than 25m copies worldwide.

Rafael Alvero, who developed the musical project, said it was the culmination of a decade's efforts to gain the confidence of the foundation. He said the show would be inspirational, comparing Frank's life story to a tragic opera.

"When I first came here they [the foundation] had this doubt, about how somebody can do a musical of a story like this," said Alvero. "The thing we want to do is ... through the music, to understand the story better," he said.

Once the foundation had given its permission, the hunt for actors capable of mixing the sombre nature of the material with the high energy of a musical began. Castillo said she felt honored to be playing such an important role, and that there were things the two had in common.

The Franks moved from Germany to Holland in 1933, when Anne was four. Castillo's mother fled from Cuba when Isabella was young, and they lived in hiding in Belize before immigrating to Miami.