The Tony-nominated designers of 'Dog Day Afternoon' are bringing the heat

Costume designer Brenda Abbandandolo, lighting designer Isabella Byrd, and set designer David Korins share how they created a "pressure cooker" of a Broadway play.

Summary

• Three designers of the Broadway play Dog Day Afternoon — Brenda Abbandandolo; Isabella Byrd; and David Korins — discuss how they adapted the '70s-set story for the stage
• All three are Tony Award-nominated for their work
• The show is based on the movie about a real-life Brooklyn bank robbery that went off the rails

The designers of Dog Day Afternoon on Broadway want you to feel the heat in more ways than one. The plays's title — shared by its source material, the Oscar-winning 1975 movie starring Al Pacino — is a riff on the phrase "dog days of summer," that sweltering (and in NYC's case, mercilessly humid) time of year where one second in the sun all but melts you on the spot.

"If you've experienced a New York City summer, boy, do you know how disgusting it can get," said Dog Day Afternoon lighting designer Isabella Byrd. "But we love it anyways." Added costume designer Brenda Abbandandolo, "The heat is such an important touchstone of this story."

Abbandandolo, Byrd, and set designer David Korins, all 2026 Tony Award nominees for their work on playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis's adaptation, drench the August Wilson Theatre stage in warm tones. Glaring "sunlight" pours from the rafters to illuminate the tangerine-colored chairs at a Gravesend, Brooklyn bank and costume pieces in shades of pink, orange, beige, and reddish-brown.

And if you know the movie, or the real-life event that inspired it, you know that's where Dog Day Afternoon's sunniness ends and the other kind of heat comes in. The whole show unfolds on August 22, 1972, when a trio of inexperienced criminals tried to rob the aforementioned bank and failed spectacularly. Most of the money they were after had just been moved offsite, one would-be robber immediately fled out of fear, and the remaining two (Sonny and Sal, played by The Bear's Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, in Pacino and John Cazale's onscreen roles) held the tellers hostage. Audiences are meant to feel like the bank, like the summer sun, is just as inescapable for them as for the characters.

"Whenever you get an opportunity to design a movie and bring it to the stage, you have to ask yourself the question of, what about this makes this a necessary thing? For us, that was trapping people inside of a building and never jump-cutting or crossfading away from the action," said Korins.

"[We're] trying to make a complete environment [...] without ever taking the pressure cooker of the bank heist away from us and never losing sight of all of those hostages, instead layering in narrative in front of them. That's something that, really, [only] theatre [...] can do."

Korins achieved this by designing a singular, hyper-detailed set. Even when the action moves from the bank's lobby to one of two other locations — its outside, or the liquor store across the street where law enforcement is staked out — the set doesn't get fully hidden, but merely rotates, or else fades into the background with a dimming of Byrd's lighting. The glass front door of the bank is visible in every configuration, a constant reminder of how close freedom is for the hostages — or, when a scene shifts out of the bank, how easy it is to go back to being held inside.

The Dog Day Afternoon designers' work also compresses time in addition to compressing space. Abbandandolo's costumes reflect the "specific look and palette" of '70s Gravesend, with urban "grime and realness" while still feeling "a little more suburban" than other city settings due to being on the borough's outskirts. Byrd noted, though, that the play reflects the "working-class neighborhood energy" that still defines Gravesend today, and her work on the show is timeless — the oppressive light and heat represented by Byrd's lighting, while reflective of a specific day, return year after year after year.

Korins described his set as "a time capsule of the '30s and the '40s and every decade leading up to 1972." He elaborated, "A building [from] the '70s actually was probably built 40 years earlier [...] So when people see it and they think [the] '70s, actually, in a way, that fabric was from the 1950s, and that door was from the 1940s. It's been amazing to do all that research of trying to pull it all together."

And of course, for all the designers, that research did involve the movie — to an extent. Byrd looked to Sidney Lumet's film "as a touchstone of quoting certain visual elements," but it largely ended there. After all, beyond the aesthetics, the cultural conversation has changed around many of Dog Day Afternoon's themes, like transgender identities (Sonny organizes the robbery to fund his partner's transition) and the moral responsibilities of law enforcement. If anything, they're hotter topics than ever.

"It's a perfect film. It's truly one of the most nuanced character-study films of the past couple generations. We couldn't just copy that; that's not fair to us," said Byrd. "So knowing New York, knowing how we love New York, and knowing the political and love statement of the story [...] we had to twist it and make it our own in order to transform both the temperature and the politic."

The play's heat just keeps mounting.

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Photo credit: Dog Day Afternoon on Broadway. (Photos by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)