In his Broadway debut, Jon Bernthal struts and frets in a serviceable facsimile of Al Pacino in the new stage adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon — but the new production joins a recent list of film-based nonmusicals like last year’s Good Night, and Good Luck that fails to justify its existence in a new medium. Yes, director Rupert Goold’s slick production features a memorable set design by David Korins (sharply lit by Isabella Byrd) where the exterior of a Brooklyn bank pivots so that we get an inside look at the target of hapless robbers who storm the place just as it’s closing — despite the fact that most of the cash had been removed hours earlier.
Sidney Lumet’s Oscar-winning 1975 thriller, based on a real-life bank robbery from three years before, had an edgy, ripped-from-the-headlines appeal with subplots about police brutality, economic inequality, media excess, and homosexuality that still feel timely. The film also had a claustrophobic feel as the misfit miscreants Sonny and Sal (played by Pacino and John Cazale on screen) jumpily tried to improvise their way through a heist that was intended to be an in-and-out quickie but devolved into a prolonged standoff with police involving innocent hostages and the glaring lights of TV news crews.
Stephen Adly Guirgis, a poetic chronicler of the down and out in New York City in drama like Between Riverside and Crazy, must have seemed like a perfect fit for the material, and there are moments when his script matches the spiky energy of the original. But he leans too heavily on comedy, particularly in the cartoonishly broad first act, and he fails to ratchet up any sense of tension or suspense as the plot lumbers to its explosive but predictable finale. (Most of the seat rattling can be attributed to Cody Spencer’s bass-heavy sound design.)
The cast of 20 — a luxuriously big number for a nonmusical — is almost uniformly excellent, with standout turns from Michael Kostroff as the bank manager widely disliked by his mostly female staff, John Ortiz as the grizzled New York cop who handles most of the negotiations until the head of the local FBI office (Spencer Garrett) butts in, and Jessica Hecht in an expanded role as the banks’ spinsterish head teller (who improbably seems to cozy up to Sonny in a relatively short time).
While Bernthal sometimes struggles to escape from the shadow of Pacino, at one point stomping his feet and pumping his arms like a little boy throwing a tantrum, Ebon Moss-Bachrach seems far too recessive as his criminal companion, Sal. We keep hearing that the character is an unstable live wire who fires several shots during the standoff, but Moss Bachrach seems mostly withdrawn. Despite the actor’s natural rapport with Bernthal, there are only occasional hints of the menace that the hostages describe. He assures Sonny that he’s not high, except maybe for cold meds, and he does seem more likely to pass out from exhaustion than to mow down the hostages in a drug-fueled rampage. When he does perk to life, he does so with a flourish that feels off, as when he not only dumps out boxes of donuts but does a little soft-shoe dance dispersing their crumbs all over the bank lobby floor.
Bernthal, on the other hand, is strongest when he’s speechifying, whether justifying his crime to the tellers with a populist spin (“The only difference between us common people and those thieving billionaires is they got it and don’t need it — and we need it and don’t got it”) or invoking the deadly 1971 Attica prison riot to whip up the anti-authority crowd supposedly gathered outside the bank (he even tries to get theatergoers to join the chant). Ortiz’s Detective Fucco, leaning over the mezzanine with a bullhorn while cops assemble in the theater aisles, seems uncomfortable as Sonny bypasses him as a negotiator for a direct appeal to the public.
Guirgis’s understandable efforts to turn Frank Pierson’s Oscar-winning screenplay into a visceral theatrical experience repeatedly fall short. But Sonny’s no anti-authoritarian zealot acting on principle, however misguided; he’s a sad sack trying to scrape together money for his lover Leon’s gender-reassignment surgery. When we do meet Leon, played by Esteban Andres Cruz with a mix of sass, heart, and understandable frustration, they’re little more than a ’70s caricature of a transgender person. (Sonny even uses he/him pronouns to describe Leon.) And unlike the film, the play is mostly silent on the media circus that erupts outside the bank — aside from Sal’s bitterness that the news anchors describe him and Sonny as “avowed homosexuals.” (In reality, the two did meet in a Greenwich Village gay bar called Danny’s.)
Despite providing some meaty roles to talented actors, Dog Day Afternoon feels like a really expensive workshop of a play that could have used a few more rounds of revisions to better balance and update the material and its tricky swirl of elements. The unanswered question here is: Why? Why turn this classic movie into a stage play? It’s as if Warner Bros. Theatricals barged into a theater, guns in hand but without a fully fleshed-out plan, and then had to cobble together an escape on the fly where nobody loses too much face (or their lives). ★★☆☆☆
DOG DAY AFTERNOON
August Wilson Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through July 18 for $63 to $498