Why turn “Dog Day Afternoon,” one of the greatest and most iconic of New Hollywood movies, into a Broadway play? It’s not the first legendary film of the ’70s to get a stage adaptation (there was the Bryan Cranston version of “Network,” not to mention “Rocky the Musical”). And it likely won’t be the last (“Carnal Knowledge,” anyone? How about “All the President’s Men” or “The Heartbreak Kid”?). On some level, the stage version of “Dog Day Afternoon” that opened tonight at the August Wilson Theatre answers the “Why do it?” question with an existential: because it’s there.
But, of course, there are other reasons to reconfigure this 50-year-old movie, several of them very much of the moment. Let’s start with the obvious fact that “Dog Day Afternoon” is a pressure-cooker hostage drama, based on an incident that took place on Aug. 22, 1972, that can translate in a dynamic and unforced way to the stage. The play that Stephen Adly Guirgis has written accomplishes that. The whole thing is set in a confined space: a Brooklyn bank (in the movie it’s the First Brooklyn Savings Bank; the play changes it back to a Chase branch in Gravesend, which is what it was in reality), making the story supremely compact and theater-friendly.
Sonny, portrayed onscreen by Al Pacino in what many consider to be his greatest performance, is now played by the gifted Jon Bernthal, who wears a frown and three-inch-high wavy hair that makes him resemble Robert De Niro in the early scenes of “Raging Bull.” He talks a lot like Pacino, down to the whiny quaver in his voice, though this Sonny is rougher and tougher, more of a New Yawk street yokel. He seems less vulnerable in his cluelessness. Once again, he walks into the bank at closing time with two bumbling henchmen — the flaky hippie Ray Ray (Christopher Sears), who quickly slips away, and Sal (played by “The Bear’s” Ebon Moss-Bachrach), an icy tall loon with a short fuse and a sawed-off shotgun. With almost no plan, Sonny makes a shambling attempt at an armed robbery, only to end up trapped in the bank with the manager and five female tellers as his hostages.
The entire saga unfolds, as it did in the film, inside the bank and on the sidewalk in front of it, where Sonny comes out to negotiate with the cops, and to grandstand. (He becomes one of those freak ’70s media stars.) The play opens on an outside view of the bank (the double glass doors), but then David Korins’ startling set spins around to open the scene up to the audience; now we’re inside the bank. The set rotates back and forth, taking us in and out, incorporating the film’s double point-of-view. The rubberneckers who gather across the street are represented by crowd noise, and at one point a handful of cops stalk down the aisles of the theater, guns pointed right at Sonny. The chief negotiator, Det. Fucco (made rather cuddly by John Oritz) — as well as the FBI hardass, Sheldon (Spencer Garrett), who takes over for him — stand at the front of the stage, or in a mock-up of a liquor store, talking to Sonny on the phone.
As a piece of stagecraft, “Dog Day Afternoon,” directed by Rupert Goold, does a canny job of translating the film’s logistics, keeping the flow of action taut and invigorating. But it also does something that’s very Broadway. The movie had moments of discordant comedy, but Sidney Lumet staged it in his hair-trigger fluorescent vérité style. You felt like you were right there, in that bank, with those beleaguered slovenly ’70s people. On stage, the comedy gets ratcheted up, especially when Sonny is dueling with Colleen, the head teller, played by Jessica Hecht with an abrasive punch that makes you think of Anne Meara. Each of the tellers, and even Sal in his paranoid stupor, are slotted into an increasingly companionable back-and-forth repartee that makes the play, at times, feel like a version of “Cheers” if “Cheers” had been a trip-wire crime drama with a lost psycho at its center.
There is one small shift in tone, and one larger, more significant one. Sonny comes out of the bank, jabbering about how it’s the little guy who’s always getting screwed — by the financiers, the Rockefellers, you name it. He gives a speech about money that’s a ragtag rabble-rouser (“The only difference between us and those thieving millionaires is that they got it and don’t need it, and we need it and don’t got it!”), ending with a double-fist-raised version of the most famous moment from the movie (“Attica! Attica!”), which Bernthal plays to the hilt. In the film, Sonny’s furious tinpot Marxism is part of his skewed reality. But at the preview performance of the play that I attended, this speech was cheered like something out of a No Kings rally, making you wonder: Has the story lost a layer of irony? Or have the times simply caught up with it? Maybe both.
The bigger shift is this. In the movie, Sonny’s hidden motivation for his insane crime is revealed in the second half when Leon, his gay partner, is paraded to the location in his bathrobe and put on the phone to talk to Sonny. We learn that Sonny is trying to get the money to pay for Leon’s sex-reassignment surgery, and Chris Sarandon’s performance as the clingy, forlorn, droopy-eyed Leon, who’s at once bitchy and crestfallen, infuses the movie. The casual portrayal of the love between these two men was groundbreaking in 1975. But for everything the film showed you, it still understated the reality of their relationship, and that, in an eerie locked-in-time way, is part of what made it so moving.
The stage version of “Dog Day Afternoon” is different. When a TV news report, blaring in the bank, announces that the bank robbery was led by “two homosexuals,” there are laughs arising from the fact that Sal (who is straight) is aghast at the report. But Bernthal’s Sonny isn’t aghast. He comes right out and tells the hostages that yes, he’s a homosexual, and that there’s nothing wrong with that. And when Leon arrives, seated at the front of the stage, and has his talk with Sonny, the tone is more explicit. Esteban Andres Cruz, evoking Sarandon, makes Leon a sad and touching figure, but the real tears are shed by Sonny. The film updates “Dog Day Afternoon” to an awareness of this union and what it means that’s more upfront and unapologetic and, in its way, more sentimental.
But it’s also less powerful. This loud-and-proud version of Sonny certainly feels progressive, but in a different way it soft-pedals Sonny’s complications. In the real event the film was based on, the Sonny figure, John Wojtowicz, did not want the Leon figure, whose name was Ernie (and who resembled a Warhol Superstar), to get sex-reassignment surgery. But Ernie was threatening suicide, and that’s why Wojtowicz committed the robbery — to save his lover’s life. He may also have been looking to pay off Mob loans. I wish the play had enlarged the desperation of all this, maybe by flashing back to a scene of the two of them. As it stands, there’s something about the situation that now seems overly cut-and-dried.
My ultimate feeling about “Dog Day Afternoon” as a play comes down to something so obvious it feels almost unfair to say it out loud, but I will anyway: The movie was so much better. As a director, Sidney Lumet was a volatile master of urban space and atmosphere, and Pacino’s Sonny is, quite simply, one of the indelible characters in movie history. Bernthal does a solid job portraying this angry, tormented, messed-up Brooklyn fireplug, and in some ways he gets closer to who the real Sonny was. But he doesn’t haunt us with the grandeur of his delusions the way Pacino did. It never tears us apart to see this dog have his day.
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