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The story of Dog Day Afternoon is so familiar that it’s almost a surprise to find out that the movie wasn’t based on a beloved play or novel. But no, the 1975 film was inspired by a real incident in 1972 (and accompanying Life magazine article), when a pair of robbers attempted to hold up a bank in Brooklyn, only to find that much of the expected cash had already been picked up by an armored car. The standoff turned into a hostage situation – and, adding to the headline-grabbing nature of the crime, one of the robbers was supposedly seeking money to pay for his lover’s gender-affirming surgery. The film version starring Al Pacino evidently departed far enough from reality (including mostly changed names) to win the Academy Award for best original screenplay of 1975, and has endured as a classic for half a century. Its combination of timelessness and prescience and capturing a specific moment in New York City history makes it seem like ideal material to transition to the Broadway stage.

But the new stage version of Dog Day Afternoon runs up against the unintended speed bump of hindsight. Details that in the film felt like canny, offhand snapshots of the 1970s now come across as self-conscious in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s production, and even cutesy as the play attempts to re-create famous scenes from the movie with greater retrospective context (to say nothing of eye-rolling additional historical color, like having characters mention that this dirty movie called Deep Throat is now playing at a theater near them). At times, it’s hard not to think of Wes Anderson’s film Rushmore, in which the precocious Max Fischer Players put on a theatrical version of Pacino’s similarly true-life thriller Serpico.

It’s not as if Dog Day Afternoon demands fealty to every one of those details, either. There’s plenty of room for variation on the basic setup of a frantic, determined, yet not exactly experienced robber interacting with police and hostages over the course of a hot and stressful day. The new version takes some advantage of this; playwright Guirgis smartly avoids a slavish re-creation of the dynamics seen in the film, beefing up the female bank-teller characters, specifically the newly created Colleen (Jessica Hecht), who despite her tart assessments becomes increasingly sympathetic to lead robber Sonny (Jon Bernthal). For his part, Bernthal must know that he can’t compete with a young Pacino, and plays Sonny as more of a guy who talks a little too fast for his brain to keep up. He’s still in over his head, but he’s less obviously sweaty with desperation.

With that change, though, some of the urgency leaks out of the story, and it’s easier to see the instructive architecture Guirgis has added, over-explaining the action and further limiting its spontaneity. In one of the most famous scenes in the movie, Sonny whips the gathered crowd outside the bank into a frenzy and starts chanting “Attica!”, referring to the then recent prison riot in a fit of inspiration equally canny and desperate. The play brings up the Attica riots in a more cogent (and therefore vaguely preachy) way, well ahead of this scene – which makes the chanting feel more like a weak payoff than an authentic outburst. (It’s almost like we’re watching Dog Day Afternoon: Origins.) The scene does take advantage of live-show electricity, with cops lining the aisles of the theater and piped-in crowd noises mixed with the real audience’s genuine enthusiasm for Bernthal’s well-supported anti-police, populist tirade. Elsewhere, though, the impressive rotating set becomes a hindrance; director Rupert Goold has to do a lot of shuffling just to toggle between various locations and characters, an accidental tribute to the power of just how strong the original film’s editing was.

On stage, the characters often get lost in the show’s elaborate staging. As Sal, Sonny’s more violent accomplice, Ebon Moss-Bachrach is appropriately menacing and unpredictable, yet it’s hard not to see his primary function as making Sonny look even more likable and reasonable by comparison – just as the hectoring FBI agent Sheldon (Spencer Garrett) exists largely to make the local cop Detective Fucco (John Ortiz) seem friendlier (and to nudge along an eye-rolling running gag involving the mispronunciation of Fucco’s name). You might expect a 2026 version of the play to go a little further into the character of Leon (Esteban Andres Cruz), Sonny’s lover, who by contemporary standards reads as transgender (hence Sonny’s seeking money for his surgery). Yet this relationship, too, feels muddled; Sonny and Leon share a touching phone-call scene as in the film, but the writing simplifies Sonny’s self-identified sexuality in a way that’s only more confusing given the 1972 setting. Ultimately, Sonny’s contradictions (like the fact that he maintains a more traditional wife and kids while besotted with Leon) are downplayed, rather than complicating him further. None of these people feel especially lived-in.

Though it would have been a riskier proposition, maybe an updated Dog Day Afternoon actually set in 2026 would have made better use of this cast than a play that attempts an awkward negotiation between 1970s period details and a 2020s sensibilities. As is, this version is perfectly encapsulated by its repeated use of various David Bowie songs, including at least two that postdate the 1972 setting: they produce an initial blast of pleasurable recognition, followed by a nagging thought that they’re here to serve the audience, not enhance what’s actually happening on stage.