‘Dog Day Afternoon’ Unleashes on Broadway With a Loud Contemporary Bark

It’s hard to think of a playwright who seems as constitutionally well-suited to adapt “Dog Day Afternoon,” Sidney Lumet’s beloved 1975 film, for the stage than Stephen Adly Guirgis. David Mamet, who scripted Lumet’s 1982 film “The Verdict,” also comes to mind, though the latter carries a slight disadvantage by virtue of having been born and cut his creative teeth in Chicago.Mr. Guirgis, in contrast, is a New Jersey native but grew up in New York City, where many of his gorgeously gritty plays — among them “Our Lady of 121st Street,” “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Between Riverside and Crazy” — unfold, often tracking troubled people on the margins of society.Such characters were, along with New York itself, central in Lumet’s crime drama, which was inspired by a Life Magazine article documenting an attempted robbery and ensuing hostage crisis at a Brooklyn bank in 1972. On screen, Al Pacino played Sonny Wortzik, based on the real John Wojtowicz, a Vietnam veteran who was one of two principal perpetrators; the late, great John Cazale was cast as Salvatore Naturile, the name of Wojtowicz’s actual partner in the incident.For the new Broadway production of “Dog Day” — credited in the playbill, interestingly, as an adaptation of the magazine piece and the movie, in that order — director Rupert Goold has enlisted a pair of leading actors known for working together on a celebrated TV series, FX’s “The Bear”: Jon Bernthal portrays Sonny, the restless ringleader, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach plays Sal, depicted as quieter and dimmer.Both actors, impressively, manage to make the roles their own. Mr. Bernthal’s Sonny has a nervous intensity and a scrappy charisma that nods to Mr. Pacino’s, but those qualities are scaled up for the stage to create a muscular, sometimes moving, and often funny anti-hero. Mr. Moss-Bachrach recaptures some of the pathos Casale brought to Sal while, helped by the new script, giving him a more pronounced sense of menace.That’s the good news. There have been reports of conflict between Mr. Guirgis and the producing team of this “Dog Day” over whether the play’s tone should be comedic or suspenseful. I would add that while the film also had flashes of wit, its grainy, intimate naturalism, the way it made you feel like a fly on the wall taking in all that suspense and chaos, struck me as a potential challenge for anyone hoping to make it a Broadway vehicle, particularly with Mr. Goold, a director who has rarely been given to understatement, on board.Messrs. Goold and Guirgis seem to have responded by leaning into the opportunity to make something bigger, louder, and, yes, funnier than the movie, with mixed results. There are passages that play like populist commentary, such as when Colleen, the bank’s smart and sassy head teller — played by Jessica Hecht, superb as always — protests Sonny’s assertion that their governor, Nelson Rockefeller, is a criminal himself.“You think the Rockefellers don’t steal for a living?” he snaps. “That World Trade Center thing they built downtown? Twin Towers? — Twin Theft! Millions in graft, local shops strong-armed out of business, phony occupancies to preserve real estate values downtown, which they own mostly all of it.”The famous film scene in which Sonny greets a crowd outside the bank by referencing Attica Prison, where an infamous uprising had just occurred, is recreated to include the audience. “Power to the people!” Mr. Bernthal bellows, as actors playing police officers line the aisles, pointing their guns. Undeterred, his character hurls profanities at his governor, mayor, and president, as well as the NYPD; at the preview I saw, the crowd whooped and cheered as if he were attacking a current official.The law is represented here, as it was in the movie, by a local cop and an FBI agent, but those characters are fleshed out and made more adversarial, with both comic and didactic intent. John Ortiz’s wry Detective Fucco cracks jokes about his heart medicine while trying to win Sonny’s trust; Agent Sheldon, a caricature of reactionary politics played by a suitably pompous Spencer Garrett, berates and belittles him, adding, in one of his more G-rated observations, “The whole city’s going broke due to free handouts, welfare, and bloated social programs that don’t work and that you can’t pay for.” Sonny’s motive for robbing the bank, to get money for a sex-change operation for the man he sees as his true wife, is also milked for both laughs and social import, with a gay activist declaring that marriage “is an antiquated, antediluvian, patriarchal, heteronormative institution of oppression.” Then again, the phone call between Sonny and his lover, Leon, portrayed by a droll Esteban Andres Cruz, is written and played with great poignance.Music is another highlight of the production, which features excerpts of period classics by the likes of David Bowie and Marvin Gaye; David Korins’s scenic design and Brenda Abbandandolo’s costumes also evoke the era with stylish authenticity. In its general inclination for overstatement, though, this “Dog Day Afternoon” feels very contemporary.

‘Dog Day Afternoon’ Unleashes on Broadway With a Loud Contemporary Bark

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