Dog Day Afternoon, Sidney Lumet’s hit 1975 film about a Brooklyn bank robbery and hostage situation, has been adapted — and seemingly reimagined — for the Broadway stage. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis penned the adaptation, which opened Monday night at the August Wilson Theatre to dismal reviews.
Jon Bernthal plays Sonny, the role brought to life in the film by Al Pacino. Starring opposite Bernthal is his The Bear colleague Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Sal (played in the film by John Cazale). The two characters are at the center of the story, as their attempt to rob a bank (for reasons eventually revealed during the course of the show) goes awry.
However, the robbery isn’t the only aspect of the production that seems to have gone amiss. Critics across the board have hammered Guirgis’s interpretation of the material, with many questioning the 180-degree turn from the film’s electric suspense to the stage production’s slapstick comedy take.
USA Today’s Patrick Ryan deemed the production an “appalling near-disaster,” adding that Guirgis “seems to fundamentally misunderstand everything that makes the film so unnervingly devastating, robbing the story of all suspense in favor of broad slapstick and borderline homophobic disdain for its main characters.”
He added that Guirgis and director Rupert Goold made the production “a farcical comedy of errors from start to finish, undercutting every potentially poignant or frightening moment with a punchline.”
The New York Times’ Jason Zinoman referenced a report the publication ran last week, indicating that producers barred Guirgis from entering the theatre during tech rehearsals. Tensions were reportedly running high between Guirgis and Mark Kaufman, the executive vice president and managing director of Warner Bros. Theater Ventures, which is among the play’s lead producers. A joint statement was issued to the Times
“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,” Zinoman wrote in his review of the production. “But there’s no getting around the fact that this undercooked staging does feel like the product of an unresolved artistic dispute.”
Even while applauding Bernthal as a “dynamic whirligig of desperate energy,” Zinoman argued that despite being centered around a bank robbery, the production “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,” Zinoman wrote.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Richard Lawson, noting the rumored rift and how the production “barreled ahead anyway,” wrote that the result “is a garish disaster of tone and tempo, dull and grating at once.”
“Guirgis would seem a natural choice to adapt the film. His best plays — Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, Between Riverside and Crazy — are vivid depictions of hardscrabble New Yorkers, many of them caught in the undertow of crime and consequence,” Lawson wrote.
“Surely he, so rooted in the argot of the city at the center of Dog Day, could find a way to massage Lumet’s 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.”
Running at the August Wilson Theatre through June 28, 2026
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