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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?\u00a0\u00a0The answer is obvious to me: It\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not what the advance publicity would have us believe.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cIt becomes a crass commercial venture if you\u2019re bringing something back, and it doesn\u2019t have something to say about where we are today,\u201d\u00a0\u00a0said\u00a0Stephen 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 \u201c\u201970s atmospherics that still resonate now \u2014 the economic malaise, political and social unrest, and the divisive power of the news media.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the past quarter century, in such original plays as the Pulitzer-winning \u201cBetween Riverside and Crazy\u201d and \u201cJesus Hopped the \u201cA\u201d Train,\u201d\u00a0Guirgis 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 \u201cDog Day Afternoon\u201d something other than a crass commercial venture, it would be Guirgis. But I guess nobody can, because Guirgis hasn\u2019t.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u00a0But that one problem makes \u201cDog Day Afternoon\u201d not just dated, but poorly timed.<\/p>\n
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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\u2026for Sonny\u2026 from New York Police Department Detective Benny Fucco (John Ortiz.) With the bank surrounded by police \u2013 and TV reporters \u2013 the robbery attempt has turned into a siege and a circus, the bank employees now Sonny and Sal\u2019s hostages.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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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. <\/p>\n
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L to R- Wilemina Olivia-Garcia (\u201cLorna\u201d), Andrea Syglowski (\u201cAlison\u201d), Jon Bernthal (\u201cSonny\u201d), Elizabeth Canavan (\u201cRoxxanna\/Gloria\u201d), Paola L\u00e1zaro (\u201cGuadalupe\u201d), Ebon Moss-Bachrach (\u201cSal\u201d), Michael Kostroff (\u201cButterman\u201d)<\/p>\n
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 (\u201cIs she always like this? With the stick up her ass?\u201d 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 \u2014 The bank robbers are now far more clownishly inept \u2014\u00a0\u00a0which 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\u2019s 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\u00a0Cody Spencer fills in for the montage of street scene in the movie.<\/p>\n
The changes are really minimal, hardly noticeable for anybody who hasn\u2019t seen the movie recently., (Who would register, for example, that the police gather in a nearby liquor store \u2013 beneath a neon sign that says \u201cliquor store\u201d \u2013 rather than in a barbershop?)\u00a0\u00a0The story remains essentially the same, and that\u2019s the problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019m not sure such people exist, but if you\u2019re one of them, and you don\u2019t want to learn about the main twist, you can stop reading here.<\/p>\n
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It\u2019s not until Act 2 that we are told Sonny is \u2013 as the TV anchorman puts it on the broadcast that the hostages are all watching \u2013 an \u201cavowed homosexual.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Eventually, we learn that Sonny planned the robbery so that he could pay for a sex change operation for his \u201cwife,\u201d Leon (Esteban Andres Cruz), a prostitute and mental patient institutionalized after attempting suicide.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the depiction of the gay and trans characters that made me question the claim that the story speaks to\u00a0\u00a0today in any way that feels useful.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The play is explicitly based on the 1975 film, and on\u00a0the original article<\/a>\u00a0about the robbery\u00a0\u00a0that inspired the film, written by P.F. Kluge\u00a0and\u00a0Thomas Moore and\u00a0published in Life Magazine on September 22, 1972, just a month after the incident, Although it is entitled \u201cThe Boys in the Bank,\u201d an allusion to the pioneering 1968 gay play \u201cThe Boys in the Band,\u201d and although three years had passed since the Stonewall riots launched the modern gay rights movement,\u00a0the 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. \u201cIn the bad times following the collapse of his marriage, Wojtowicz drifted into the netherworld of New York\u2019s homosexual bars.\u201d In this \u201cnetherworld,\u201d\u00a0\u00a0he met\u00a0\u00a0Ernest Aron; \u201c..the relationship flourished and at last culminated in a bizarre drag wedding\u201d attended by 300 guests, including the couple\u2019s parents. \u201cIn its attention to detail, its finery, its ceremony, the wedding couldn\u2019t have been more straight.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0So, what made it \u201cbizarre\u201d is that it was a normal wedding?<\/p>\n It feels undeniable that the \u201cbizarre\u201d homosexual \u201cnetherworld\u201d of the story was central in its appeal to\u00a0\u00a0Hollywood; would it have been made otherwise?\u00a0\u00a0As in the play, director Sidney Lumet and writer Frank Pierson\u00a0(who won an Oscar for his screenplay) waited until more than halfway through the film before they revealed Sonny\u2019s 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\u2019d like to think that Lumet, whose career included such serious films of social justice as \u201c12 Angry Men,\u201d was using the shock to send a subtle message that homosexuals are indeed human beings.\u00a0\u00a0But 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 Congressmember\u00a0Sarah McBride\u00a0,\u00a0actors Laverne Cox and Elliot Page, gold medalist Olympic gold medalist,\u00a0former U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health\u00a0Rachel Levine,\u00a0civil rights attorney Taylor Brown, whom New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has appointed as the director of the newly-created Mayor\u2019s Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs (to name a few) \u2013 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,\u00a0and the ACLU has tracked hundreds of state and local anti-LGBTQ bills throughout the United States, including\u00a0a law passed in Kansas<\/a>\u00a0that revokes driver\u2019s licenses for people whose listed gender doesn\u2019t match what they were assigned at birth. \u201cAs trans issues became inescapable in polarized national politics, explicit anti-trans bias spiked 16 percent from 2021 to 2024,\u201d\u00a0Spencer Kornhaber\u00a0writes in an Atlantic magazine about \u201cthe new homophobia.<\/a>,\u201d adding \u201cthe trend line of long-declining homophobia reversed, resulting in a 10-point jump for explicit anti-gay bias over that same period.\u201d<\/p>\n In an effort to justify the\u00a0\u00a0Broadway production as something more than a cynical business decision, the people behind \u201cDog Day Afternoon\u201d 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0The actor cast as Leon, Esteban Andres Cruz, who gave first-rate performances in two shows I saw (Guirgis\u2019 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 \u2013 as did\u00a0Chris Sarandon\u00a0in the film, a performance for which he was Oscar-nominated.<\/p>\n There is also a scene now (which is not in the movie) where Sonny mocks Sal for claiming he isn\u2019t homosexual (Wojtowicz\u00a0met his actual accomplice,\u00a0\u00a019-year-old Salvatore Naturile, in a gay bar.) The taunting alarms the branch manager, because\u00a0of how volatile Sal is.<\/p>\n \u201cSonny, are you crazy? Do not bait this man.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNobody\u2019s baiting nobody over here, okay?\u201d Sonny says. \u201cBut to be a homosexual \u2014 okay \u2013 it ain\u2019t a bad thing. Not at all. Who saved you from Sal, huh? A homosexual. Who\u2019s keeping you all alive in here? A homosexual. If ya ask me, it\u2019s a lot harder, a lot more manly, to swim against the tide, to be true to oneself under the eyes of God above\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Is this a monologue that we should admire for its advocacy, or distrust as one of\u00a0\u00a0several implausibly polished political speeches Guirgis has crafted for Sonny? Bernthal does get to shout \u201cAttica, Attica\u201d \u2013 the most iconic moment in the movie \u2013 and this time the audience gets to shout it with him.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the same time, the play attempts to make comic hay out of Sonny asking for his \u201cwife\u201d and the police bringing him his female wife, the annoying, hectoring Gloria (Elizabeth Canavan, who also portrays Sonny\u2019s annoying mom, and Roxxana, the most annoying bank teller.) This is a cheap joke at the expense of the characters and erodes the play\u2019s credibility; it\u2019s impossible to believe that Sonny would not specify which one of his wives he was asking for.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n I was not sure how to react to the scene where a TV reporter interviews an activist, Adam Mangano,\u00a0\u00a0with the \u201cGay Liberation Front\u201d about Sonny, whom he knew when Sonny was a member, but is nothing but bitchy about him, above all for\u00a0\u00a0wanting to get married, a \u201cheteronormative institution of oppression.\u201d<\/p>\n The TV reporter follows up:<\/p>\n \u201cA\u00a0high ranking NYPD Spokesman recently categorized Homosexuality as \u201cOne of the pernicious and insoluble problems continuing to plague this city\u201d\u2013 and yet many are calling Sonny Amato a hero \u2014 what\u2019s your take?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMy take is it\u2019s 1972\u2013 homosexuality is still officially classified as a mental disorder\u2019 \u2014 the American Psychiatric Association continues to categorize us as \u2018sexual deviants\u2019 and sociopathic personalities\u2019 \u2014 and Sonny Amato does nothing to dispel the myth\u201d<\/p>\n Exactly.<\/p>\n Dog Day Afternoon<\/a> \t\t\tLike this:<\/p>\n Like Loading…<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Esteban-Andres-Cruz-Leon.jpeg\")
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August Wilson Theater through June 28, 2026
Running time: Two hours and 15 minutes, including intermission.
Tickets:\u00a0\u00a0$62.72 \u2013 $446.88\u00a0
In person and digital rush and digital lottery: $45.\u00a0Broadway Rush and Lottery Policies<\/a>
Written by Stephen Adly Guirgis based on the article \u201cThe Boys in the Bank,\u201d published by LIFE Magazine, written by\u00a0P.F. Kluge\u00a0and\u00a0Thomas Moore\u00a0and on the film \u201cDog Day Afternoon\u201d by\u00a0Warner Bros.
Directed by Rupert Goold
Scenic design by\u00a0David Korins,\u00a0costume design by\u00a0Brenda Abbandandolo,\u00a0lighting design by\u00a0Isabella Byrd,\u00a0sound design by\u00a0Cody Spencer,\u00a0hair and wig design by\u00a0Leah J. Loukas, makeup design by\u00a0Katie Gell\u00a0and dialect coaching by\u00a0Kate Wilson
Cast: Jon Bernthal as Sonny, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Sal, John Ortiz as Detective Fuucco,\u00a0Jessica Hecht as Colleen, Spencer Garrett as Sheldon,\u00a0Michael Kostroff as Butterman,\u00a0Elizabeth Canavan as roxxanna\/Sonny\u2019s Mom\/Gloria, Brian D. Coats, Esteban Andres Cruz, Alex J. Gould, Danny Johnson, Paola L\u00e1zaro, Dom Martello,\u00a0Wilemina Olivia-Garcia,\u00a0Michael Puzzo,\u00a0Christopher Sears as Leon, Michael Shayan as Young Nesbit, Jeff Still as Widower Dave, Andrea Syglowski as Alison,\u00a0and\u00a0Carmen Zilles.<\/p>\n