MONTREAL -- It's a tale that must be told.

Still.

The Leanor and Alvin Segal Theatre of the Segal Centre opens its new season tonight with "The Diary of Anne Frank." The drama, adapted by Wendy Kesselman, is based on the 1955 original stage version by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett.

When asked about the challenges of presenting a play everyone knows, director Marcia Kash explained that some are not familiar with the true-life saga.

"You think everybody must know this story, but they don't," Kash says. "They know Jaws,' but they don't know this."

Kash, who previously directed the work, has seen firsthand people who don't know the tale of Anne Frank.

"I saw it with my own eyes. There are kids, people who do not know this story," she says. "I think it's important to keep telling the story because it humanizes what happened to the Jews and so many other people during the Holocaust."

The play is based on the journals of a Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War II. The Frank family, along with others, spent 25 months hidden in a storage attic in the annex of rooms above the office of Otto Frank (the Frank family patriarch). All were betrayed to the Nazis, arrested and deported to concentration camps. Anne Frank died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen when she was 15 years old. The diary was saved by a family friend and has now been translated into 67 languages.

"I think it's very important that we keep telling the story to new generations," Kash says. "And it means a lot to me to be able to do that."

Kash, who began her career as an actor at the Royal Court Theatre in London, England, says the play is a much more modern version of the original, which was written by married playwrights Goodrich and Hackett, a well-known Hollywood writing team who also penned the first two "Thin Man" movies as well as the screen classic, "It's a Wonderful Life." "The Diary of Anne Frank" won them the 1956 Tony Award for Best Play.

How do you modernize a work like this?

"It's just in the way that it's presented," Kash says. "The older play is kind of long -- it's a play of its time, of the '50s. This moves quicker, cleaner. It's a more modern telling theatrically."

It's not just a Jewish story, she adds.

"It's a universal story. It's a timeless story."

She believes it's a tale to which all people can relate.