Dog-Gone

Jon Bernthal as Sonny in Stephen Adly Guirgis's Dog Day Afternoon, directed by Rupert Goold, August Wilson Theatre. Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

The new stage adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon just opened on Broadway, directed by Rupert Goold, doesn’t seem sure who its target audience is. If you went not knowing the source material (though that’s hard to imagine)—Sidney Lumet’s classic 1975 film about a disastrously bungled bank heist, starring Al Pacino and John Cazale in brilliant performances—you’d probably find it breezily entertaining. But the main ticket-buyers for such a brand-forward, star-anchored show (The Bear’s Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach are reinventing Pacino and Cazale’s characters) is surely people who know the film, and they’re very likely to feel confused.

This is a splendidly acted and smartly theatricalized movie spinoff, but it’s bumped up comically so far above the original that it feels overeager to please. Its laughs come at the expense of complexity. Dog Day Afternoon was a “New Hollywood” landmark that famously eschewed blatancy and genre simplification by treating its hapless and incompetent anti-heroes with sincerity, oblique humor, and even an aura of regret. The Broadway adaptation returns the material to the blatancies the movie resisted.

The story’s themes of police brutality, media mendacity, numbness to criminality, and celebrity fixation are every bit as timely today as in 1975. A bungled robbery devolves into a hostage crisis and media circus with hundreds of trigger-happy cops and reporters converging on the bank, fickle crowds gathering outside, and the hostages befriending the robbers in hopes of a taste of fame. But the film’s strongest claim to originality was never in its social commentary but rather in its indeterminate tone. Also in the shaggy edges that reminded us it was based on a true story. Watching it, you couldn’t decide whether to laugh, gasp, worry, protest, or cry.

That kind of indeterminacy is hard to find in the play. The script by the Pulitzer-winning Stephen Adly Guirgis lacks his usual sharp wit and leans on ingratiating farce, easy punch lines, and sitcom stereotypes. For anyone who knows this author, such a misfire is puzzling. Guirgis’s career has been built on an extraordinarily original, vividly imagined rogues’ gallery of marginal and vulnerable New Yorkers with deliciously foul mouths and weirdly compelling personal missions in life. His people are obvious soul-mates of the oddballs in Dog Day Afternoon, and he should’ve been perfect for this job. Given the troubles that leaked out of rehearsals before opening, though, it seems the job wasn’t perfect for him.

The New York Times reported that Guirgis was barred from rehearsals for 3 days after “tempers flared” between him and Mark Kaufman, head of Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures, the lead producer. A statement was issued that explained nothing (“We are all committed to maintaining a respectful environment for everyone involved and remain very proud of what’s onstage”), and one presumes a fuller story will eventually emerge.

Meanwhile, the show is up and, as mentioned, I do feel some people will enjoy it. Goold keeps the action trotting at a brisk clip and knows how to maximize the theatricality. The revolving set by David Korins is a clever solution to the problem of constantly moving between interior and exterior bank scenes, and it’s fun to see gun-toting cops stalking the theater’s aisles and the audience standing in for the restless crowd that shouts, “Attica!” and “Fuck the NYPD!” along with showboat Sonny (the main robber, played by Bernthal).

Jon Bernthal (Sonny) and Jessica Hecht (Colleen). Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

Bernthal, for his part, is excellent. It’s no mean feat to inhabit a role as iconic as Sonny and make it your own. Wearing Travolta-tight blue slacks and a plain white t-shirt, his character is a soulful, charming rascal who everyone knows isn’t really violent. He’s less commanding than Pacino but that’s no problem because he’s more convincing as an authentic Brooklyn loser and as a bisexual who risks everything to pay for his lover’s gender-reassignment surgery. Personally, I never quite believed Pacino’s same-sex desire.

Ebon Moss-Bachrach is also terrific as Sal, Sonny’s dimwitted accomplice, a role fundamentally retooled by Guirgis. In the movie, Cazale played a distracted, moony, gentle simpleton whom Sonny labeled a “killer” just to sound big to the cops, which got Sal killed. In the play, Sal is actually a killer—a stoned, trigger-happy, wounded menace who says things like, “I’m faithful Sonny -- like fuckin’ Rin Tin Tin! So whadda we doing? -- Cuz right now -- I could Rin Tin Tin it -- or go straight-up fuckin Manson Family!” Thuggery, interestingly enough, isn’t Moss-Bachrach’s natural type. He always maintains a thoughtful edge even when playing tough, and this layering gives Sal a rich new complication. The role’s added violence also puts a new spin on Sonny’s imputed betrayal of Sal in the end.

Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Sal. Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

The actor Jessica Hecht also stands out. She plays Colleen, the renamed head teller whom Guirgis also reconceived. In the film, this character is a sourpuss spinster Pacino calls “Mouth” (played by Penelope Allen). Here she’s a bright, sassy wisecracker always ready with smart comebacks. (To wit: “Who could disagree with Clarence Darrow here? Perish the thought!”) She glows whenever Sonny grabs her, which is pretty often, and that gives their hostage-captor bond special relish. Hecht’s comic instincts fit the spoofy spirit of this project perfectly, which set my imagination spinning.

It occurred to me, watching her land her quips, that this insistently comic adaptation might actually have been better off as something even more distant from the film, like a musical. The long gestation period (10 years!) would’ve been more understandable then, and we all would’ve given it plenty of rope for a radically different tone. Now don't dismiss this. Imagine flirty, Cole Porteresque duets for Sonny and Colleen, steamy ballads for Sonny with his two wives, and darkly ambiguous, Sondheimy “I want” songs for everyone, including the cops and hostages. Also mad dances involving the crowd and media.

I submit that this idea is no more ridiculous than the straight play currently running at the August Wilson Theatre. What’s more, its success wouldn’t be measured against the very high bar of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s amazing original plays.

Dog Day Afternoon

A play by Stephen Adly Guirgis

Based on the Life magazine article "The Boys in the Bank" by P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore and the Warner Bros. film

Directed by Rupert Goold

August Wilson Theatre