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.
