A new Broadway play took a pasting last night with reviewers.
“Dog Day Afternoon,” based on the famous Sidney Lumet movie starring Al Pacino and John Cazale, went down in flames.
The play, adapted by Stephen Adley Guirgis, seemed like an odd project in the first place. Apparently, Guirgis and the producers were at war with each other leading up to opening night.
Stars Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss Bachrach sounded like exciting choices. They work together on TV’s “The Bear.” They have endless quality credits. What could go wrong?
Apparently, everything.
Nearly every reviewer who saw it, hated it. Only the usually reliable Bob Hofler liked it. Opening night must have been like a funeral. The reviews are devastating.
New York Times: “While Bernthal is chewing scenery, Moss-Bachrach appears in an altogether different play, delivering a nicely restrained performance of a terse, repressed man.”
New York Daily News:
“The direction is neither sufficiently cohesive or detailed to really pull all of these different strands together to offer much more than a chance to have fun with genre stereotypes or relive a favorite movie. All night, you wait for a truly visceral scene, but it never comes.”
Even the mixed reviews are bad. Roma Torre pulled the whole production — about a bank robbery gone wrong — apart in NY Stage Review, and she’s usually nice.
She writes “The play, conversely, lacks any real suspense, choosing a more comedic approach with forced humor. When the head teller is finally allowed to use the restroom, her peeing behind a closed door is amped up so that everyone hears it for a cheap laugh. The hostages all have superficial backstories that are inconsequential for the most part. And for whatever reason, when Sonny demands that the cops bring them something to eat, instead of pizza which was the food of choice in real life and in the film, the stage characters end up with donuts after a silly back and forth with the police deciding where to buy them.”
These things happen on Broadway and it’s always sad. But now what? So far, “DDA” has made $1.2 million in previews each week. But it may not make it to July 12th with these reviews. It’s a bit of a mess.
