'Dog Day Afternoon' Theater Review: Jon Bernthal Leads Broadway Take
Jon Bernthal in 'Dog Day Afternoon.'
Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
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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 particular