The first thing you’ll notice at a performance of “Dog Day Afternoon” at the August Wilson Theatre is men. Rows and rows of them. Most all of a certain age.
Silver foxes have not shown up on Broadway in these numbers at least since Jeff “Roastmaster” Ross last summer, and even that show had more women in the seats. But the new show comes with the pedigree of a classic 1975 Sidney Lumet bank-heist movie, with Al Pacino roaring his way through the starring role. Add in Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach from Hulu’s intense Chicago restaurant drama, “The Bear,” and you demonstrably have sufficient appeal to attract one of Broadway’s most reluctant demographics.
“Dog Day Afternoon” has proved remarkably resilient over the past 54 years, but then it has a very interesting pedigree.
In 1972, a pair of very savvy writers named P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore sold a story to Life magazine about a highly unusual bank robbery perpetrated by a true odd couple of thieves. Through a wacky confluence of events, the Brooklyn heist turned into a full-blown hostage crisis.
Kluge and Moore wrote their narrative account of the crime exactly as if they were pitching a screenplay, putting the reader in the shoes of terrified bank tellers staring down the barrel of a gun.
“It’s closing time Tuesday August 22, at a Chase Manhattan Bank branch in Brooklyn, a modest modern structure sitting at Avenue P and East Third Street,” the pair wrote, describing how the two thieves, one chatty, one quiet, both tipped off to a delivery of cash, entered the bank, just as the unarmed security guard was locking the doors for the day. The robbers proceeded to hold all the employees as hostages at gunpoint but pledged they would come to no harm. A few paragraphs into their magazine piece, Kluge and Moore were even suggesting casting: “… now she spots the second robber, John Wojtowicz, a dark, thin fellow with the broken-faced good looks of an Al Pacino or a Dustin Hoffman.”
Not only did that article form the basis of the film, but Lumet actually took the note and cast Pacino in the role of that dark, thin fellow. The character name was changed to Sunny for the film, but not the persona.
Bernthal may lack the stage experience, but he certainly has a touch of the flamboyant insouciance of the young Pacino about him. And Moss-Bachrach is not unlike John Cazale, the “Godfather” film actor who partnered with Pacino and originally played stopped-up Sal Naturile.
Half a century year, we’re all back in that same nondescript Brooklyn bank branch, carefully re-created on a revolve by skilled designer David Korins. Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, whose distinguished body of prior work has all been original dramas, has turned the existing screenplay to “Dog Day Afternoon” into a Broadway play. And British director Rupert Goold has taken the helm.
If you remember the movie, you’ll recall the real Wojtowicz was “married” (the original Life article used quotes) to Leon (Esteban Andres Cruz). Leon was seeking gender reassignment surgery, which come to play a significant role in the climax of the hostage crisis precipitated by his partner.
The new adaptation has to figure out how to update the screenplay to avoid the mostly exploitational way such relationships were treated in the dramas of the 1970s. It struggles with that task, although what it wants to do is to use that relationship to get the audience to cheer on Sunny even more. Not a bad way to go if the way is clear.
Overall, though, “Dog Day” is a strange hodgepodge of styles, operating at cross-purposes with each other.
At times it feels like are watching a satire in the “Catch Me If You Can” mode, a caper play with an empathetic scoundrel at its core designed to engage the audience’s sympathies. At other times, the show seems more like a broad slice of 1970s Brooklyn life, replete with colorful characters who look and act like they could be on “Taxi” or “Barney Miller.” And, at times, it verges into more seriously revisionist mode, casting the robbery as an act of justifiable rebellion on the part of two outsiders and suddenly feeling not like a sitcom stuck on stage but one of Guirgis’ great dramas of quiet Gotham desperation.
The latter bits are, of course, by far the most interesting. But they have to fight through too much else for attention
Make no mistake, Bernthal is spirited, lively and quite effective, And although Moss-Bachrach seemed to me to be playing pretty much the same character as he does on “The Bear,” his sardonic introversion is always intriguing to watch, not least because he is so good at suggesting that momentous personal stakes are in play with every minor moment. Jessica Hecht, playing one of the hostages, adds her typically off-beat depth, and I was most amused by John Ortiz as the FBI agent with the standard G-man voice and personality to match.
But for me, at least, the direction is neither sufficiently cohesive or detailed to really pull all of these different strands together to offer much more than a chance to have fun with genre stereotypes or relive a favorite movie. All night, you wait for a truly visceral scene, but it never comes.
I suspect there was a lot of internal debate about how true to the original film and magazine article to be and how much to strike out anew. If so, that would explain way “Dog Day” is caught between doing what it thinks its audience will want to see and finding the guts to declare this a whole new afternoon.