Like the botched bank robbery it chronicles, the “Dog Day Afternoon” adaptation that opened Monday at the August Wilson Theater on Broadway presents such a high level of difficulty that you might find yourself rooting for it just to defy the odds.
Putting aside the challenge of replacing Al Pacino and John Cazale in two of their greatest roles, the classic 1975 film directed by Sidney Lumet is a delicately composed marvel of tone, pacing and character work, balancing farcical comedy and an anxiety-fueled heist on top of a remarkably poignant romance. It requires chutzpah to take this on.
Jon Bernthal, a specialist at playing tender tough guys, has plenty. Onstage as Sonny (the Pacino role), the motormouth orchestrator of this crime, Bernthal makes a movie star entrance, strutting downstage, chest puffed up with unearned confidence. Wildly gesticulating when not stroking his hair, he is a dynamic whirligig of desperate energy, alternating between irritated and ingratiating. He plays Sonny as a charming buffoon, leaning so far into broad comedy that the whole play eventually tips over.
The heist begins with three robbers (one partner abandons the job after the others pull out guns) the stress level, bizarrely, doesn’t change much. Even though an army of police is outside and firearms are being wielded inside, this crime scene (inspired by a real story) contains little sense of real threat. Amiable comic bickering dominates the relationship between the hostages and the criminals — it’s the kind of play in which a security guard lying on the floor after a heart attack props himself up, for a moment, to suggest where to order doughnuts, then goes limp.
That moment is characteristic of the director Rupert Goold’s glibly entertaining production. The flamboyantly flustered Bernthal doesn’t evoke Pacino so much as “Welcome Back, Kotter”-era John Travolta. While his co-conspirator, Sal (Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who stars with Bernthal in “The Bear”) recedes into the background, the playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis gives Sonny a formidable new sidekick in the bank teller Colleen, played with mouthy panache by Jessica Hecht. In a stage picture that sums up this show’s goofy spirit, Sonny aims a gun at her face and she in turn points a finger at his.
Responding to his populist rants about oligarchs, Colleen declares herself a believer in free markets. Yet when she accompanies Sonny outside to talk to the police, she’s the one who suggests that he chant “Attica! Attica!” the famous line from the film that nods to the deadly prison riot and wins over the crowd of gawkers. Like an opposites-attract buddy comedy, the bank robber and the hostage work together to win over the crowd.
This is a hostage situation that seems more like a sleepover. Initially, the bank employees are worried but quickly form a warm community of sorts. An interestingly perverse idea is hinted at here of how, in a cracked world, a utopian society can only emerge in the middle of a crime scene.
It’s the kind of unlikely joke that has been a hallmark of Guirgis’s work (like “Between Riverside and Crazy”). On paper, he is perfectly suited to this material, as a compassionate chronicler of violently verbose New Yorkers at the end of their ropes. But a little over a week before opening night, tensions about the production apparently spilled over, with the show’s producers briefly prohibiting Guirgis from attending rehearsals at the theater.
A playwright fighting for his ideas is not necessarily a bad thing and many great works of art have resulted from ferociously contentious clashes of vision. But there’s no getting around the fact that this undercooked staging does feel like the product of an unresolved artistic dispute.
The stylish period costumes (Brenda Abbandandolo) and beige and brown set design (David Korins, whose rotating bank shifts the action from inside the building to the street and offers some showstopping moments) set a mood of meticulous realism. But the comic bits and the raucous sound design, which includes deafening helicopter propellers and blaring ’70s pop hits, belong to a more cartoonish entertainment. While Bernthal is chewing scenery, Moss-Bachrach appears in an altogether different play, delivering a nicely restrained performance of a terse, repressed man. The overly articulate arguments outside the bank between Detective Fucco (John Ortiz) and the F.B.I. agent (Spencer Garrett) about the state of the city feel shoehorned in.
With a track record of directing flashy, crowd-pleasing productions (“Enron,” “Ink”) that find the showbiz energy in real world characters, Goold gravitates toward the Bonnie and Clyde-style media circus angle of this story.
In the much more layered movie, the people drawn to the scene of the crime are charmed by Sonny’s trash-talking the police, turning him into an outer borough folk hero. But the mob’s sentiment shifts with the discovery that the wife he asks to see is a man. Goold’s production turns its own audience into the mindless mob, and Bernthal gooses everyone into a frenzy with populist rallying cries. It’s a fun coup de théâtre, but what’s lost is the crowd’s homophobia.
Sonny’s sexuality doesn’t come up until the second act and it’s there that the cartoonish comic style becomes a problem. Once the romance between Sonny and his lover, Leon (Esteban Andres Cruz), becomes the focus, the play takes an abrupt turn that is unconvincing. In a televised news briefing the hostages are watching about the robbery, the reporter describes Sal and Sonny as gay. Sal gets upset and defensive, generating laughs from the audience. Talking to the police at one point, Leon, in keeping with the style of the play, cracks wise, calling himself a whore. “I’m like McDonald’s,” he says. “Over a million served.”
A half-century after the movie, which was ahead of its time, both in having an A-list star portraying a queer protagonist, but also in its nuanced portrait of a transgender character, the play seems less comfortable exploring the complexities of this relationship. Bernthal delivers a largely sexless performance.
While the dialogue keeps reminding you of the grit and grime of 1970s Brooklyn, this play is firmly a product of the family-friendly Broadway of today. Even the inevitably doomed conclusion to the robbery is given a new addition that allows audiences some easy uplift. There’s nothing wrong with comic escapism, and this show has verve and momentum that is easy to enjoy. It helps if you have never seen the movie.
Those who have seen it might smirk a little when Sonny responds to hostages’ complaints about his cursing with a Bugs Bunny snap in his voice: “This is Brooklyn. Not ‘Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.’” It’s more like a bit of both.
Dog Day Afternoon Through June 28 at the August Wilson Theater, Manhattan; dogdayafternoon.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times and writes a column about comedy.
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