Broadway’s “Dog Day Afternoon” Is a Dog
Shortly before I took my seat for “Dog Day Afternoon,” at the August Wilson Theatre, I read a dishy writeup in the Times about some backstage drama: the playwright, Stephen Adly Guirgis, had been banned from rehearsals. That news didn’t worry me much—after all, the 1975 Sidney Lumet movie required reshoots after its star, Al Pacino, watched the first-day rushes and begged for a do-over so that he could get rid of an ill-conceived mustache. In the end, Pacino’s anxiety just intensified his legendary performance as Sonny, a jittery bank robber desperate to fund his trans lover’s “sex reassignment” surgery, lending the role a magnetic warmth and pathos.
The stage version of “Dog Day Afternoon,” which has been in development for a decade, is clearly a passion project for its lead actors, Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, close friends and Meisner-method devotees—as well as co-stars on FX’s “The Bear”—who have spoken in the press about “revering” Lumet’s movie and its stars. Guirgis, who has written bracing, perceptive plays celebrating New York eccentricity, including “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train” and the Pulitzer-winning “Between Riverside and Crazy,” felt like a natural collaborator. So my fingers were crossed for a lively ride, even if there might be some bumps. Sadly, I’m obliged to report a tragic pileup on the Belt Parkway.
The play, like the movie, is loosely based on a robbery that took place in 1972, on a boiling-hot August day, when an eccentric, deep-in-debt Vietnam veteran named John Wojtowicz entered a Chase bank in Brooklyn with a gun and two accomplices, hoping for a quick score. The amateurish stickup failed, fast. The cops turned up, then the F.B.I.; during a daylong standoff, crowds flooded the streets, cheering the crooks and booing the cops. TV cameras soaked up the spectacle. It was one of the first modern media circuses, a tabloid tale about schlubs and showboats who, at the peak of New York municipal dysfunction, were embraced as populist heroes.
It’s terrific material, which Lumet spun into a kinetic, immersive visual experience, with streaks of observational humor. The Broadway team may have hoped to heighten the contradictions further, by focussing more tightly on New York oddballs under pressure. But, mystifyingly, Guirgis and the show’s director, Rupert Goold, have staged their story not as the rich, unsettling human drama that it was in real life, or even as a dark comedy with modern themes, but as a noisy sitcom punctuated by gunshots. I generally hate when theatre critics dismiss plays as sitcoms; I love sitcoms! But my alarm bells went off at the first line, in which a bank security guard announces, “2:59—guess you just ‘Beat the Clock’—you know, like the TV show?” What follows feels dumbed down and frantic, full of violent slapstick and musty sex jokes, with an ensemble of outer-borough dimwits used as gag dispensers. A stoned accomplice flees the joint, moaning that he’s getting diarrhea. The security guard, who passes out after a heart attack, suddenly stutters, “B–,” seemingly in pain, then turns out to be asking for doughnuts from Beeglemen’s, shouting, “Them Jews, they know from baked goods!” Seventies touchstones are speckled like capers in a veal piccata: Beefsteak Charlie’s. “Deep Throat.” Crazy Eddie. A lot happens, but little feels earned; the tone is an uneasy blend of zany and sour.
The staging is equally frustrating. An impressive revolving stage, which displayed both the exterior of the bank and the bland lobby inside, toggled smoothly between scenes. Yet key dramatic moments—a shooting, the robbers’ realization that the bank vault is empty—occurred in a hallway invisible to the audience, described secondhand. The music was sufficiently groovy, the costumes era-appropriate (miniskirts, Travolta-tight slacks), yet nothing conjured the tension of an oppressive August day—and nobody broke a sweat. Where is Jonathan Groff when you need him?
An even bigger problem, however, is that the movie’s moral ambiguity has been replaced by Folgers Crystals. The hostages, who in the film version were hazily sketched but convincingly idiosyncratic, have been provided with backstories—shallow ones. There’s a tramp, a ditz, a bad boss, a hippie, a by-the-book good girl. It’s difficult to care about what happens to them as they bicker and backbite.
The same is true of Sonny and Sal, his high-strung henchman. So much of acting is alchemy: when John Cazale played Sal in Lumet’s film, the character transformed from the streetwise pretty boy in Frank Pierson’s Oscar-winning screenplay into something more original, a fragile, hangdog figure whose childlike instability provoked a wary protectiveness even in the hostages whom he threatened. Sal’s best line—a plaintive, funny “Wyoming,” when Sonny asks him what country he wants to flee to—was ad-libbed. Those notes of fragility lent weight to the question of whether Sal would live or die once the police closed in.
Moss-Bachrach’s Sal is a far more familiar figure: a trigger-happy psychopath irritated that his partner isn’t more hard-core. The choice feels strategic, a way of throwing our sympathy to Sonny, but it makes the men’s dynamic more banal, a negotiation over tactics between a bad boy and a worse boy. Bernthal, usually so deft at playing sensitive bruisers, is doing cocky Pacino cosplay here, possibly because this version of Sonny is less of a tenderhearted fuckup and more of a working-class charmer, railing heroically against oligarchs and the N.Y.P.D. The cast’s sole survivor is Jessica Hecht, who pours miraculous warmth and complexity into her faintly insulting role as Colleen, the head teller, a morally upright spinster goosed by her flirtation with Sonny and the spotlight.
These hollow characterizations wind up tanking the production’s one truly audacious swing, a coup de théâtre that occurs when Sonny exits the bank and struts center stage, then urges the audience to improvise with him, becoming the street mob whose wriggly, wild energy Lumet’s film so vividly conjured. Bernthal shouts, “Attica!,” and he tosses out (fake) dollar bills. Cops patrol the aisles; recorded cheers stream through the loudspeakers, sweetening the hubbub. As people around me gamely played along—someone yelled, “Attica!”—I felt like a hostage myself, eying the exits.
The show’s greatest failure, however, is its treatment of Sonny’s sexuality, which in real life was not easily summarized: Wojtowicz, who had an ex-wife and kids, was a sketchy hanger-on at the Gay Activists Alliance, which viewed him with suspicion. He “married” a trans woman—such marriages were illegal then—but she was soon struggling to escape his jealous rages. Coverage of the robbery became a perverse representational breakthrough, with reporters portraying the gay subjects as colorful, knotty individuals rather than as pathologized cartoons. Three years later, Lumet’s film did something even riskier, humanizing an unusual romance by not sanding down its contradictions, including the fact that Sonny referred to his bride, Leon, as “he.” Not everyone loved the results—the gay film historian Vito Russo called it “the ultimate freak show”—but for decades viewers have embraced the movie’s refusal to judge or simplify. Chris Sarandon, who played Leon, once sneaked into a cinema showing and was relieved to hear the reaction: giggles, but then respectful silence during Sonny and Leon’s wistful final phone call, the moment their connection feels undeniable.
On Broadway, Leon gets the bad laughs. The character, played by Esteban Andres Cruz, has been reduced to a simpering stereotype who makes a pass at a cop and mimics a blow job. She whimpers about undone nails; she glibly describes herself as a “fucking whore” who is “like McDonald’s, over a million served.” That tender phone call is marred by dum-dum gags—“I can’t go to Algeria, what would I wear?”—and, once they hang up, even Sonny’s uncontrolled sobbing is mined for laughs. It’s a different type of failure, and an embarrassing one in 2026. “The Jellicle Ball” can’t open soon enough. ♦