{"id":555737,"date":"2026-03-31T07:28:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T07:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/555737\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T07:28:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T07:28:09","slug":"jon-bernthal-leads-broadway-take","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/555737\/","title":{"rendered":"Jon Bernthal Leads Broadway Take"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn his review for The New York Times, the critic Vincent Canby wrote of Sidney Lumet\u2019s Dog Day Afternoon<\/a>, \u201cIf you can let yourself laugh at desperation that has turned seriously lunatic, the film is funny, but mostly it\u2019s reportorially efficient and vivid, in the understated way of news writing that avoids speculation.\u201d He is right, of course: Lumet\u2019s 1975 masterpiece is, on occasion, ruefully amusing, the tics and foibles of regular life incongruously interrupting\u00a0a situation most dire and extraordinary.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFor the most part, though, Dog Day Afternoon is a sober thriller (Canby called it a melodrama) about a small-time Brooklyn bank heist blown up into a hostage crisis and city-wide fascination, about a man hard done by the system, who, for a few glorious and dangerous hours, almost breaks free by bending that very system to his will. There is a lot of serious stuff whirring through the film\u2019s mind, a consideration of the fraught tempers of its fraught times. It crackles with immediacy, murmurs with furious sorrow.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the creators behind the new Broadway<\/a> production of Dog Day Afternoon seem to have gotten stuck on the funny part. Adapted by Pulitzer-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, this Dog Day is an antic comedy of bumblers and busybodies and freaks, of nasty jokes and weak attempts at rabble-rousing. It\u2019s a frustrating image, Guirgis and everybody else involved in this folly watching the intimate neorealism of Lumet\u2019s film and saying, \u201cLet\u2019s turn this into a big Broadway farce.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThere were reportedly some clashes over tone during production; the Times reports<\/a> that Guirgis was, for a time, banned from the rehearsal room. Which might indicate that sometime in the lead-up to previews pointed out that maybe not everything in this true-ish story should be a joke. But the production barreled ahead anyway, and what\u2019s resulted is a garish disaster of tone and tempo, dull and grating at once.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tPerhaps the first sign that something is wrong comes right at the very beginning, when a minor character, timid would-be third perpetrator Ray Ray, declares that he doesn\u2019t have the fortitude to continue with the robbery. In the film, ringleader Sonny (Al Pacino then, Jon Bernthal<\/a> now) simply sighs and lets him go. Which does eventually happen on stage, too, but not before Ray Ray loudly complains of stomach issues and then promptly soils himself. We are, I guess, meant to laugh at this pathetic display \u2014 look at these bozos, already almost literally shitting the bed \u2014 instead of seeing, as we do on film, the fragile humanity of those about to be framed by the media and police as animal degenerates.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSuch cheap comedy abounds as the play unfolds. The chief police negotiator\u2019s last name has been changed to Fucco, perhaps only so a swaggering FBI agent can repeatedly call him \u201cFucko.\u201d The bank teller characters \u2014 women of varying ages all fearing for their lives while warily bonding with their captors \u2014 are turned into floozies or sardonic sitcom moms. Sal, the edgier and less predictable robber softly played by John Cazale in the film, is 2026-ified into a dumb, loose-cannon maybe-closet-case by The Bear\u2019s Ebon Moss-Bachrach<\/a>, doing a tired riff on his character from that show<\/a>. Sitting through the play, I kept thinking to myself, \u201cWait, is this what the movie is like?\u201d I then rewatched the film afterward and can confidently state that, no, of course it is very much not.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tGuirgis would seem a natural choice to adapt the film. His best plays \u2014 Jesus Hopped the \u2018A\u2019 Train, Between Riverside and Crazy \u2014 are vivid depictions of hardscrabble New Yorkers, many of them caught in the undertow of crime and consequence. He can swing between kitchen-sink drama and poetic-comedic fugue with stunning ease. Surely he, so rooted in the argot of the city at the center of Dog Day, could find a way to massage Lumet\u2019s minimalist approach into something that might proportionately fill a Broadway house. But his instincts fail him badly here. Worse, he seems quite sour on the people of this story, often mocking them when compassion would be far more effective.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe way Guirgis handles Sonny\u2019s second wife, Leon \u2014 a trans woman who has just attempted suicide \u2014 is particularly galling. It\u2019s quite something that a film from 50 years ago is far more sensitive to Sonny and Leon\u2019s complicated relationship than is a play made in the present day. Guirgis paints Leon (played by Esteban Andres Cruz) as a flighty, feisty, man-crazy sex worker. It\u2019s all a big gag, another bit of crassness to join the rest \u2014 like, say, the wheezy jokes about how one bank teller is supposed to see Deep Throat with her husband, or how another slept with their uptight boss. (I probably need not remind you, but none of that is in the movie.) Guirgis is practically begging us not to take anyone seriously, for what reason I can\u2019t fathom.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDirector Rupert Goold<\/a> is ill-suited to mitigate that sneering impulse. Goold has done good things on stage (King Charles III<\/a>, among others) and decent things on film (Judy<\/a>, for which Ren\u00e9e Zellweger won her second Oscar), but this particular milieu favors none of his fortes. The action sequences, if we can call him that, are clunky, shouty jumbles. There is nary an ounce of tension to be found during the entirety of this supposedly heated stand-off. Goold doesn\u2019t do much with David Korins\u2019 impressively realistic set but rotate it back and forth depending on whether we\u2019re inside the bank or outside of it. And he has steered most of his actors to the broadest of performances, favoring high pitch and volume over anything that might resemble the measured authenticity of Lumet\u2019s ensemble.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBernthal does, on occasion, register as a real human being caught in a moment of desperation. He maintains a springy energy even when the play around him sags. Jessica Hecht, as head teller Colleen, fights her miscasting with noble grace; she finds ways to turn canned one-liners into something resembling the everyday. Jon Ortiz gives Fucco (sigh) a certain air of decency that vaguely evokes Charles Durning\u2019s brilliant shagginess in the film. Honestly, though, I was most taken with Spencer Garrett of Mad Men fame, who nails the smarmy, officious tone of the FBI guy brought on to fix the NYPD\u2019s mess. He feels truly of the story\u2019s time and place, whereas most others are playing to a studio audience.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThat audience is made complicit in perhaps the gravest of this production\u2019s crimes. Goold has chosen to turn the \u201cAttica! Attica!\u201d moment from the film \u2014 in which Sonny revels in a frenzy of anti-authority sentiment \u2014 into a bit of crowd participation. Bernthal takes center stage, waving his arms and asking those in attendance to repeat \u201cAttica!\u201d and to applaud (or perhaps echo) him when he says \u201cFuck you, NYPD!\u201d I don\u2019t know that Broadway audiences (especially at the matinee I attended) are exactly the right cohort to try to sway toward such public displays of anarchy, and thus the moment is rendered achingly limp and awkward.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMore crucially, though, this hammy call-and-response completely upends what makes the moment in the film so electric. Yes, Sonny does initiate the Attica chant \u2014 evoking the brutal suppression of a prison uprising that happened the year prior \u2014 but he is reacting to the already extant fervor of those who have gathered around the bank to spur Sonny on, to lend their proletarian support. Lumet captures an ailing city bristling with tension, its citizens enraged at corrupt police and politicians, clamoring to assert their humanity in the face of, well, the Man. It is a thrilling, spontaneous and tragically fleeting burst of revolutionary outcry.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Broadway, though, Dog Day Afternoon attempts to force that out of its onlookers rather than earn it, turning Sonny\u2019s shouts of reckless heroism into a hollow marketing slogan utterly stripped of context. Maybe some theatergoers will put down their $30 themed cocktails to clap and cheer along, deciding right then and there to buy an \u201cAttica! Attica! Attica!\u201d tote bag in the lobby on their way out, happy to have had the Dog Day experience. But the Sonny of the film would certainly be appalled to see such a thing. I think the hostages would be, too.<\/p>\n

\n\tVenue: August Wilson Theater<\/a>, New York
Cast: Jon Bernthal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Jessica Hecht, Jon Ortiz
Director: Rupert Goold
Writer: Stephen Adly Guirgis
Set design: David Korins
Costume design: Brenda Abbandandolo
Lighting design: Isabella Byrd
Sound design: Cody Spencer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his review for The New York Times, the critic Vincent Canby wrote of Sidney Lumet\u2019s Dog Day…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":555738,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[21540,176342,20237,88,84819,165408,12362],"class_list":["post-555737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-broadway","tag-dog-day-afternoon","tag-ebon-moss-bachrach","tag-entertainment","tag-jon-bernthal","tag-rupert-goold","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=555737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/555738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=555737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=555737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=555737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}