Broadway Play Review—“Dog Day Afternoon”

Dog Day Afternoon

Written by Stephen Adly Guirgis

Directed by Rupert Goold

Performances through June 28, 2026

August Wilson Theatre, 245 West 52nd Street, New York, NY

dogdayafternoon.com

John Ortiz (center) in Dog Day Afternoon (photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

There are several problems with the stage adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon, the classic 1975 film directed by Sidney Lumet with Al Pacino as bungling bank robber Sonny centering a richly and blackly comic portrait of New York in 1972. The biggest flaw is that the flavorful New York atmosphere of which Lumet was a master is almost completely missing. 

Of course, that’s because the stage cannot replicate what Lumet could show: a Brooklyn neighborhood where dozens of police and reporters—including news helicopters—and hundreds of locals showed up. In the film, the crowd is another character, hooting and hollering, at first cheering on Sonny—who exhorts them to yell “Attica!” to mock the police (mere months after prisoners there were killed during rioting)—before turning on him as the day drags on and it comes out that he needs money for his partner Leon’s gender-reassignment surgery. The “Attica” moment becomes the big first-act finale, with the audience taking over as the Brooklyn crowd while Sonny yells out those three syllables, which isn’t a very compelling replacement.

Otherwise, the play is well-staged by Rupert Goold on David Korins’ terrific set of the bank’s interior and exterior, which swings adroitly back and forth depending on wherever we are in the scene. But aside from sound effects that blast “New York” to the audience, the authenticity of early ’70s Brooklyn is absent. Stephen Adly Guirgis has written plays that drip with the exciting if sordid atmosphere of New York City that’s not usually captured elsewhere, like his Pulitzer Prize-winning Between Riverside and Crazy, so he might have seemed a logical choice for Dog Day. 

His dialogue has the usual rat-a-tat of the city; even though large chunks come from Frank Pierson’s Oscar-winning screenplay, lots of other dialogue is new to the show. Guirgis even invents an amusing scene of a TV reporter talking to a gay-rights advocate after the disclosure of Sonny’s and Leon’s relationship, but this seems shoehorned in. But perhaps a few more such moments would have better taken the pulse of snarky local press coverage and local people’s reactions.

Guirgis too often coasts, though, as cheap humor prevails over incisive dialogue. Even outing Sonny to the others in the bank is played for laughs, which seems rather ironic in this context. Guirgis even changes the name of the cop in charge from Moretti (played so memorably by Charles Durning in the movie) to Fucco, which occasions repetitive mispronunciations of his name as Fucko. It’s to John Ortiz’s credit that, as Fucco, he gives the most sympathetic and well-rounded portrayal in the show. 

Lumet also had Al Pacino, John Cazale and Chris Sarandon to further make this tragicomic tale riveting and unforgettable. Onstage, Jon Bernthal tries so hard not to act like Pacino that he ends up doing it anyway as Sonny; as his partner in crime Sal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach is as effectively low-key as Cazale was, but in his own sardonic way. As head teller Colleen, Jessica Hecht is not as irritatingly mannered as she usually is, but I would have liked to have seen what Andrea Syglowski—a trenchant actress who plays one of the tellers—could have done with that part. Esteban Andres Cruz doesn’t have a chance to make Leon as believable in his brief appearance as Sarandon did in the film, since—again—Guirgis plays Leon’s stay at Bellevue for easy yucks. And the phone call between Leon and Sonny (one of the highlights of the film) doesn’t have the same heartbreaking weight.

It might seem unfair to compare the play to the film, but this production keeps inviting it, mostly to its detriment. The stage version even uses a snippet of Elton John’s “Amoreena,” a rollicking deep cut from Tumbleweed Connection that’s played over the film’s opening credits, to begin act two. My most pressing thought after seeing this was, now that three 1975 best picture Oscar nominees have had stage adaptations (also One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Jaws, by way of The Shark Is Broken), when will we get to see Nashville and Barry Lyndon onstage?