Jon Bernthal in 'Dog Day Afternoon.' Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman In his review for The New York Times, the critic Vincent Canby wrote of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, “If you can let yourself laugh at desperation that has turned seriously lunatic, the film is funny, but mostly it’s reportorially efficient and vivid, in the understated way of news writing that avoids speculation.” He is right, of course: Lumet’s 1975 masterpiece is, on occasion, ruefully amusing, the tics and foibles of regular life incongruously interrupting a situation most dire and extraordinary.
For the most part, though, Dog Day Afternoon is a sober thriller (Canby called it a melodrama) about a small-time Brooklyn bank heist blown up into a hostage crisis and city-wide fascination, about a man hard done by the system, who, for a few glorious and dangerous hours, almost breaks free by bending that very system to his will. There is a lot of serious stuff whirring through the film’s mind, a consideration of the fraught tempers of its fraught times. It crackles with immediacy, murmurs with furious sorrow.
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But the creators behind the new Broadway production of Dog Day Afternoon seem to have gotten stuck on the funny part. Adapted by Pulitzer-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, this Dog Day is an antic comedy of bumblers and busybodies and freaks, of nasty jokes and weak attempts at rabble-rousing. It’s a frustrating image, Guirgis and everybody else involved in this folly watching the intimate neorealism of Lumet’s film and saying, “Let’s turn this into a big Broadway farce.”
There were reportedly some clashes over tone during production; the Times reports that Guirgis was, for a time, banned from the rehearsal room. Which might indicate that sometime in the lead-up to previews pointed out that maybe not everything in this true-ish story should be a joke. But the production barreled ahead anyway, and what’s resulted is a garish disaster of tone and tempo, dull and grating at once.
Perhaps the first sign that something is wrong comes right at the very beginning, when a minor character, timid would-be third perpetrator Ray Ray, declares that he doesn’t have the fortitude to continue with the robbery. In the film, ringleader Sonny (Al Pacino then, Jon Bernthal now) simply sighs and lets him go. Which does eventually happen on stage, too, but not before Ray Ray loudly complains of stomach issues and then promptly soils himself. We are, I guess, meant to laugh at this pathetic display — look at these bozos, already almost literally shitting the bed — instead of seeing, as we do on film, the fragile humanity of those about to be framed by the media and police as animal degenerates.
Such cheap comedy abounds as the play unfolds. The chief police negotiator’s last name has been changed to Fucco, perhaps only so a swaggering FBI agent can repeatedly call him “Fucko.” The bank teller characters — women of varying ages all fearing for their lives while warily bonding with their captors — are turned into floozies or sardonic sitcom moms. Sal, the edgier and less predictable robber softly played by John Cazale in the film, is 2026-ified into a dumb, loose-cannon maybe-closet-case by The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach, doing a tired riff on his character from that show. Sitting through the play, I kept thinking to myself, “Wait, is this what the movie is like?” I then rewatched the film afterward and can confidently state that, no, of course it is very much not.
Guirgis would seem a natural choice to adapt the film. His best plays — Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, Between Riverside and Crazy — are vivid depictions of hardscrabble New Yorkers, many of them caught in the undertow of crime and consequence. He can swing between kitchen-sink drama and poetic-comedic fugue with stunning ease. Surely he, so rooted in the argot of the city at the center of Dog Day, could find a way to massage Lumet’s minimalist approach into something that might proportionately fill a Broadway house. But his instincts fail him badly here. Worse, he seems quite sour on the people of this story, often mocking them when compassion would be far more effective.
The way Guirgis handles Sonny’s second wife, Leon — a trans woman who has just attempted suicide — is particularly galling. It’s quite something that a film from 50 years ago is far more sensitive to Sonny and Leon’s complicated relationship than is a play made in the present day. Guirgis paints Leon (played by Esteban Andres Cruz) as a flighty, feisty, man-crazy sex worker. It’s all a big gag, another bit of crassness to join the rest — like, say, the wheezy jokes about how one bank teller is supposed to see Deep Throat with her husband, or how another slept with their uptight boss. (I probably need not remind you, but none of that is in the movie.) Guirgis is practically begging us not to take anyone seriously, for what reason I can’t fathom.
Director Rupert Goold is ill-suited to mitigate that sneering impulse. Goold has done good things on stage (King Charles III, among others) and decent things on film (Judy, for which Renée Zellweger won her second Oscar), but this particular milieu favors none of his fortes. The action sequences, if we can call him that, are clunky, shouty jumbles. There is nary an ounce of tension to be found during the entirety of this supposedly heated stand-off. Goold doesn’t do much with David Korins’ impressively realistic set but rotate it back and forth depending on whether we’re inside the bank or outside of it. And he has steered most of his actors to the broadest of performances, favoring high pitch and volume over anything that might resemble the measured authenticity of Lumet’s ensemble.
Bernthal does, on occasion, register as a real human being caught in a moment of desperation. He maintains a springy energy even when the play around him sags. Jessica Hecht, as head teller Colleen, fights her miscasting with noble grace; she finds ways to turn canned one-liners into something resembling the everyday. Jon Ortiz gives Fucco (sigh) a certain air of decency that vaguely evokes Charles Durning’s brilliant shagginess in the film. Honestly, though, I was most taken with Spencer Garrett of Mad Men fame, who nails the smarmy, officious tone of the FBI guy brought on to fix the NYPD’s mess. He feels truly of the story’s time and place, whereas most others are playing to a studio audience.
That audience is made complicit in perhaps the gravest of this production’s crimes. Goold has chosen to turn the “Attica! Attica!” moment from the film — in which Sonny revels in a frenzy of anti-authority sentiment — into a bit of crowd participation. Bernthal takes center stage, waving his arms and asking those in attendance to repeat “Attica!” and to applaud (or perhaps echo) him when he says “Fuck you, NYPD!” I don’t know that Broadway audiences (especially at the matinee I attended) are exactly the right cohort to try to sway toward such public displays of anarchy, and thus the moment is rendered achingly limp and awkward.
More crucially, though, this hammy call-and-response completely upends what makes the moment in the film so electric. Yes, Sonny does initiate the Attica chant — evoking the brutal suppression of a prison uprising that happened the year prior — but he is reacting to the already extant fervor of those who have gathered around the bank to spur Sonny on, to lend their proletarian support. Lumet captures an ailing city bristling with tension, its citizens enraged at corrupt police and politicians, clamoring to assert their humanity in the face of, well, the Man. It is a thrilling, spontaneous and tragically fleeting burst of revolutionary outcry.
On Broadway, though, Dog Day Afternoon attempts to force that out of its onlookers rather than earn it, turning Sonny’s shouts of reckless heroism into a hollow marketing slogan utterly stripped of context. Maybe some theatergoers will put down their $30 themed cocktails to clap and cheer along, deciding right then and there to buy an “Attica! Attica! Attica!” tote bag in the lobby on their way out, happy to have had the Dog Day experience. But the Sonny of the film would certainly be appalled to see such a thing. I think the hostages would be, too.
Venue: August Wilson Theater, New York Cast: Jon Bernthal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Jessica Hecht, Jon Ortiz Director: Rupert Goold Writer: Stephen Adly Guirgis Set design: David Korins Costume design: Brenda Abbandandolo Lighting design: Isabella Byrd Sound design: Cody Spencer
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