Why have Warner Bros. with 42 other producers financed a new Broadway play about a botched, two-bit bank robbery in Brooklyn half a century ago? The answer is obvious to me: It’s the star power past and present. The hit Al Pacino movie has been adapted for Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Emmy winners making their Broadway debuts.
That’s not what the advance publicity would have us believe. “It becomes a crass commercial venture if you’re bringing something back, and it doesn’t have something to say about where we are today,” said Stephen Adly Guirgis, the playwright hired to write the script, his first-ever adaptation. His quote is in an article claiming he suffuses the play with “’70s atmospherics that still resonate now — the economic malaise, political and social unrest, and the divisive power of the news media.”
Over the past quarter century, in such original plays as the Pulitzer-winning “Between Riverside and Crazy” and “Jesus Hopped the “A” Train,” Guirgis has proven to be our premier poet of the New York City streets, with gritty, witty, profane and humane portraits of New Yorkers on the margins and on edge. If anybody could make “Dog Day Afternoon” something other than a crass commercial venture, it would be Guirgis. But I guess nobody can, because Guirgis hasn’t.
To be fair, there is really only one problem that mars this production, which otherwise shares some of the same pleasures as the 1975 movie: Some intense acting, an adrenalized air of suspense, a feel for quintessential New York humor, chaos, and resilience.
But that one problem makes “Dog Day Afternoon” not just dated, but poorly timed.
The Broadway play follows the plot of the movie, which takes place (as did the true story that inspired it) in and around a Chase Manhattan Bank branch on Avenue P in Gravesend Brooklyn, on August 22nd, 1972. Sonny (Jon Bernthal) and two confederates Sal (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Ray-Ray (Christopher Sears) enter the bank to rob it at gunpoint. But things go awry right away. Ray-Ray panics and runs away, and soon, the branch manager Nelson Butterman (Michale Kostroff) gets a telephone call…for Sonny… from New York Police Department Detective Benny Fucco (John Ortiz.) With the bank surrounded by police – and TV reporters – the robbery attempt has turned into a siege and a circus, the bank employees now Sonny and Sal’s hostages.
Bernthal is a volatile and muscular Sonny, more openly weepy than Pacino (which is perhaps more suitable for the stage), while Moss-Bachrach is quietly menacing.
Compared to the movie, the playwright has given many of the other characters more lines, backstories and heightened personalities. The head teller Colleen (the always reliable Jessica Hecht) is even more forward and fearless, arguing with her captors, even outright reprimanding them like a dean of discipline (“Is she always like this? With the stick up her ass?” Sonny asks her co-worker plaintively.) Ortiz as the detective is a talkative mensch, the FBI agent Sheldon (Spence Garrett) harshly condescending to him. In general, the production plays up the comedy in the first act — The bank robbers are now far more clownishly inept — which at times feels overdone, as if the creative team is straining to distinguish itself from the movie. Certain scenes also have been altered, mostly to reflect the difference in what’s do-able live on stage versus on film, although David Korins set, which revolves to show the inside and the outside of the bank, largely keeps the action flowing, and the sound design by Cody Spencer fills in for the montage of street scene in the movie.
The changes are really minimal, hardly noticeable for anybody who hasn’t seen the movie recently., (Who would register, for example, that the police gather in a nearby liquor store – beneath a neon sign that says “liquor store” – rather than in a barbershop?) The story remains essentially the same, and that’s the problem.
Explaining the reason for its poor timing probably requires a spoiler alert, for those theatergoers who have never seen the movie, nor even heard about what happens in it. I’m not sure such people exist, but if you’re one of them, and you don’t want to learn about the main twist, you can stop reading here.
It’s not until Act 2 that we are told Sonny is – as the TV anchorman puts it on the broadcast that the hostages are all watching – an “avowed homosexual.” Eventually, we learn that Sonny planned the robbery so that he could pay for a sex change operation for his “wife,” Leon (Esteban Andres Cruz), a prostitute and mental patient institutionalized after attempting suicide.
It’s the depiction of the gay and trans characters that made me question the claim that the story speaks to today in any way that feels useful.
The play is explicitly based on the 1975 film, and on the original article about the robbery that inspired the film, written by P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore and published in Life Magazine on September 22, 1972, just a month after the incident, Although it is entitled “The Boys in the Bank,” an allusion to the pioneering 1968 gay play “The Boys in the Band,” and although three years had passed since the Stonewall riots launched the modern gay rights movement, the magazine article is colored by the still-prevalent prejudices of the times. The authors tell us the robber, whose real name was John Wojtowicz, was a Vietnam veteran who had married a woman and had a family with her. “In the bad times following the collapse of his marriage, Wojtowicz drifted into the netherworld of New York’s homosexual bars.” In this “netherworld,” he met Ernest Aron; “..the relationship flourished and at last culminated in a bizarre drag wedding” attended by 300 guests, including the couple’s parents. “In its attention to detail, its finery, its ceremony, the wedding couldn’t have been more straight.” So, what made it “bizarre” is that it was a normal wedding?
It feels undeniable that the “bizarre” homosexual “netherworld” of the story was central in its appeal to Hollywood; would it have been made otherwise? As in the play, director Sidney Lumet and writer Frank Pierson (who won an Oscar for his screenplay) waited until more than halfway through the film before they revealed Sonny’s sexual orientation and his reason for the robbery. There was shock value in this gun-toting Vietnam vet being gay, all the more so because Sonny was portrayed by Al Pacino, the recent breakout star of The Godfather and Serpico. I’d like to think that Lumet, whose career included such serious films of social justice as “12 Angry Men,” was using the shock to send a subtle message that homosexuals are indeed human beings. But this might be giving him too much credit, since the story fits so snugly into the standard old trope of homosexuals as violent criminals and suicidal mental patients.
In any case, the Broadway producers have decided to bring renewed attention to this ultimately sad spectacle revolving around a troubled trans person at a time when, on the one hand, 1. there are a growing number of public figures of accomplishment who are trans – Congressmember Sarah McBride , actors Laverne Cox and Elliot Page, gold medalist Olympic gold medalist, former U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, civil rights attorney Taylor Brown, whom New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has appointed as the director of the newly-created Mayor’s Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs (to name a few) – and, on the other hand, 2. Republicans have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads targeting transgender people, the Trump administration has reinstated a ban on transgender individuals serving in the military, and the ACLU has tracked hundreds of state and local anti-LGBTQ bills throughout the United States, including a law passed in Kansas that revokes driver’s licenses for people whose listed gender doesn’t match what they were assigned at birth. “As trans issues became inescapable in polarized national politics, explicit anti-trans bias spiked 16 percent from 2021 to 2024,” Spencer Kornhaber writes in an Atlantic magazine about “the new homophobia.,” adding “the trend line of long-declining homophobia reversed, resulting in a 10-point jump for explicit anti-gay bias over that same period.”
In an effort to justify the Broadway production as something more than a cynical business decision, the people behind “Dog Day Afternoon” would surely point to the effort they make to update the at-best ambivalent attitude toward LGBTQ people inherent in the story they have resurrected.
The actor cast as Leon, Esteban Andres Cruz, who gave first-rate performances in two shows I saw (Guirgis’ Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven and Bathhouse.ptx), identifies as trans-nonbinary. Cruz is given a larger role in terms of number of lines, and does a credible job – as did Chris Sarandon in the film, a performance for which he was Oscar-nominated.
There is also a scene now (which is not in the movie) where Sonny mocks Sal for claiming he isn’t homosexual (Wojtowicz met his actual accomplice, 19-year-old Salvatore Naturile, in a gay bar.) The taunting alarms the branch manager, because of how volatile Sal is.
“Sonny, are you crazy? Do not bait this man.”
“Nobody’s baiting nobody over here, okay?” Sonny says. “But to be a homosexual — okay – it ain’t a bad thing. Not at all. Who saved you from Sal, huh? A homosexual. Who’s keeping you all alive in here? A homosexual. If ya ask me, it’s a lot harder, a lot more manly, to swim against the tide, to be true to oneself under the eyes of God above…”
Is this a monologue that we should admire for its advocacy, or distrust as one of several implausibly polished political speeches Guirgis has crafted for Sonny? Bernthal does get to shout “Attica, Attica” – the most iconic moment in the movie – and this time the audience gets to shout it with him.
At the same time, the play attempts to make comic hay out of Sonny asking for his “wife” and the police bringing him his female wife, the annoying, hectoring Gloria (Elizabeth Canavan, who also portrays Sonny’s annoying mom, and Roxxana, the most annoying bank teller.) This is a cheap joke at the expense of the characters and erodes the play’s credibility; it’s impossible to believe that Sonny would not specify which one of his wives he was asking for.
I was not sure how to react to the scene where a TV reporter interviews an activist, Adam Mangano, with the “Gay Liberation Front” about Sonny, whom he knew when Sonny was a member, but is nothing but bitchy about him, above all for wanting to get married, a “heteronormative institution of oppression.”
The TV reporter follows up:
“A high ranking NYPD Spokesman recently categorized Homosexuality as “One of the pernicious and insoluble problems continuing to plague this city”– and yet many are calling Sonny Amato a hero — what’s your take?”
“My take is it’s 1972– homosexuality is still officially classified as a mental disorder’ — the American Psychiatric Association continues to categorize us as ‘sexual deviants’ and sociopathic personalities’ — and Sonny Amato does nothing to dispel the myth”
Exactly.
Dog Day Afternoon
August Wilson Theater through June 28, 2026
Running time: Two hours and 15 minutes, including intermission.
Tickets: $62.72 – $446.88
In person and digital rush and digital lottery: $45. Broadway Rush and Lottery Policies
Written by Stephen Adly Guirgis based on the article “The Boys in the Bank,” published by LIFE Magazine, written by P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore and on the film “Dog Day Afternoon” by Warner Bros.
Directed by Rupert Goold
Scenic design by David Korins, costume design by Brenda Abbandandolo, lighting design by Isabella Byrd, sound design by Cody Spencer, hair and wig design by Leah J. Loukas, makeup design by Katie Gell and dialect coaching by Kate Wilson
Cast: Jon Bernthal as Sonny, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Sal, John Ortiz as Detective Fuucco, Jessica Hecht as Colleen, Spencer Garrett as Sheldon, Michael Kostroff as Butterman, Elizabeth Canavan as roxxanna/Sonny’s Mom/Gloria, Brian D. Coats, Esteban Andres Cruz, Alex J. Gould, Danny Johnson, Paola Lázaro, Dom Martello, Wilemina Olivia-Garcia, Michael Puzzo, Christopher Sears as Leon, Michael Shayan as Young Nesbit, Jeff Still as Widower Dave, Andrea Syglowski as Alison, and Carmen Zilles.
