Review: Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach Make Dog Day Afternoon Bearable

“Attica! Attica!”—that’s one of Al Pacino’s most famous ad-libs and probably the most memorable quote from the 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, a Sidney Lumet classic about a bank robbery gone wrong. For audiences of the time, it sounded like a rallying cry against indiscriminate police violence, the kind that gets innocent people killed. Nowadays, not many remember what the word refers to; we have our own chants and protest cries.

You can almost sense some audience members leaning forward as The Bear’s Jon Bernthal emerges from a bank in the new Dog Day Afternoon stage adaptation, now running at the August Wilson Theatre, and wondering, “Is he gonna say it?” He does, and when he does, it feels like the ball dropping on New Year’s Eve: inevitable and quickly anticlimactic.

That sensation of quiet let-down hit me after watching Stephen Adly Guirgis’s version of the events surrounding the famous bank robbery that took place in Brooklyn on August 22, 1972. He has based his play on Lumet’s movie and a Life magazine article titled “The Boys in the Bank” (by P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore) and reimagined it all with his own dialogue and characters.

Guirgis is a consummate New York playwright, with some solid gems under his belt including Between Riverside and Crazy, which earned him a Pulitzer. If ever there were a film primed for him to transfer to the stage, Dog Day is it. It’s gritty and funny and very, very New York.

However, his Dog Day Afternoon won’t, I’ll wager, be ranked among his best. Guirgis and director Rupert Goold have certainly leaned hard into the funny aspects of the plot—too hard. Now, this ultimately tragic story of two desperate bunglers comes off as a sitcom with almost zero dramatic tension or suspense. Let’s not even talk about the send-them-out-the-door-smiling ending (a bane of modern plays) that made my eyes roll to the back of my head.

Guirgis’s play follows the bare-bones plot of the movie but mostly goes its own way. Vietnam vet Sonny (Bernthal) and ex-con Sal (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) enter a Chase Manhattan bank with the intent of robbing the place and making a quick getaway. Accompanying them is their woefully unprepared accomplice, Ray Ray (Christopher Sears), who has brought a guitar, instead of a rifle, to the heist. Duh.

After Sal pulls a gun on bank manager Butterman (Michael Kostroff), things immediately start to go wrong as nervous Ray Ray bails on his partners and Sonny is faced with a cashless safe and a trio of cheeky Brooklynite tellers (Elizabeth Canavan, Wilemina Olivia-Garcia, and Andrea Syglowski). The head teller is the combative Colleen (a hilarious Jessica Hecht, stealing every scene), tough as nails and dead-set against anything happening to her girls. And these crooks better watch their language, too.

After railing against rotten cops and the Rockefellers, Sonny gets a call from Detective Fucco (John Ortiz), who has the place surrounded by NYPD and wants to negotiate release of hostages (Spencer Garrett plays an annoying FBI suit who gets a kick out of calling the detective “Fucko”). Sonny is surprised to hear the word “hostage,” since everyone there has been getting chummy, swapping stories about love affairs and sharing candy bars. Who knew a bank robbery could be such fun?

The humor of this real-life farce is what makes the story appealing. Sonny and Sal have guns, but Sonny is a likable misfit, a gay vet who’s just trying to pay for the gender-affirming surgery of his wife, Leon (a marvelous Esteban Andres Cruz making us laugh and cry all at once). Sal may be a little scarier, but we know he’s a guy who has been mauled by the system. All it takes is a calming song from bank employee Guadalupe (Paola Lázaro) to show us the little boy inside. That guitar came in handy after all.

As for suspense? There isn’t much. You’d be forgiven for forgetting that an armed robbery was taking place at all. Balancing humor and tension is tough, and Goold just doesn’t make it happen, even with Moss-Bachrach doing an excellent job skulking in the background and looking like he could pop off any minute.

Anyone coming to see him and Bernthal won’t be disappointed. Both are great, with Bernthal channeling Pacino like a pro, even if he goes a little overboard. This is a role that he could have made his own. He’s got the chops, but you can’t hang it all on “Attica.”

The bank itself is a marvel. David Korins’s revolving set is the kind of scenery you give a standing ovation to. Brenda Abbandandolo’s costumes capture the wide styles of the ’70s (Bernthal’s shirt gives him added sex appeal), and Leah J. Loukas’s hair and wigs re-create the era’s distinctive coifs. Isabella Byrd’s lighting is positioned awkwardly in the outdoor scenes; when the strobing red of the cop cars flashes, the actual stage lights distractingly reflect off the bank’s glass doors. But Cody Spenser’s thunderous sounds of helicopters and shouting crowds give the play its brief moments of heart-pumping excitement.

How much of that shouting came from the actual audience was tough to make out. I found it a bit hard to believe that well-heeled theatergoers were cheering in earnest at Sonny’s anticapitalist and anti-NYPD rants. “Fuck the Rockefellers. Fuck the NYPD. Attica! Attica!,” Bernthal hollers as he tosses a wad of cash into the orchestra. Alas, you can only ad-lib a line once.