Inside Broadway’s Dog Day Afternoon: Jon Bernthal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and More on the New Adaptation

Dog Day Afternoon is officially on Broadway, bringing the 1975 true crime drama to the stage for the first time. Directed by Olivier winner Rupert Goold, the play depicts a Brooklyn hold-up gone awry, with Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach making their Broadway debuts as a pair of amateur bank robbers. The show began performances on March 10 and officially opens on March 30. Broadway.com stopped by a recent press event for the production to talk to the cast and creative team.

“What I love about it is that it's not just a bank heist. It's a bank heist where things go wrong. It's a mess of a bank heist. It ends up being a story about other themes. I think the reason it endures is that it's a love story. It's about loyalty and family and so many other things,” says Michael Kostroff, a television mainstay who is returning to Broadway to play the role of Butterman after understudying in The Nance in 2013.

Sidney Lumet and Frank Pierson’s script is being adapted by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, who has penned such works as Between Riverside and Crazy, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot and The Motherf**ker with the Hat. For Broadway veteran Jessica Hecht, who is playing Colleen, it was Guirgis' script that brought her on board—not necessarily its iconic source material. “I really do love new writing and I love deciphering how a playwright thinks and what the poetry of that world is about," she says. "Even if it is a pedestrian world that seems void of poetry, there is some and then it's even more exquisite.”

“When [Guirgis] called me completely out of the blue to ask me if I wanted to do a reading, I said yes before I even knew what it was. And then when I heard what it was, I was like, triple yes,” says Moss-Bachrach, the Emmy-winning star of The Bear and Girls who will be taking on the role of Sal DeSilva. 

Bernthal stars as Sonny Amato (Sonny Wortzik in the film, played by Al Pacino). "It's an American masterpiece," he says of the Academy Award winning screenplay. “I think it does require a bit of audacity [to adapt]. I think we really understand how sacred it is. We look at the film and the people who have told this story before with absolute and utter reverence. But I do have to say, this is really our own. This is really Stephen's take on it, and it's got a lens on it—a specific New York lens that I think is modern and pertinent and exciting and funny and dangerous.”

An opportunity like this also fulfills a lifelong dream for the actor. “I really want to honor the 18-year-old kid who never thought in a bajillion years that he would ever be able to do this, to be in a Broadway show. And I think for both [Moss-Bachrach and I], we hold that really dear," Bernthal adds. "It's a community that we hold in the highest regard. I just want to give this our absolute all, and I promise you, we're trying as hard as we can."

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