A contact sheet held up to a work lamp and read like evidence: that is where the Broadway production photographs of Here There Are Blueberries begin. Shot by Matthew Murphy, the set of ten was released by the production on opening day at the Barrymore Theatre.
Most of the frames are built around projection. In one, the names and SS ranks of camp staff are thrown across the back wall, each tagged with a verdict such as “possible, but unlikely”. In another, a family snapshot from the album fills the set while two men talk in wooden chairs below it. Elsewhere a single performer stands in a pool of blue light, or a speaker faces a microphone stand beneath enlarged pictures of SS staff at leisure. The widest shot pulls all the way back to take in the company across the research desks and lamps of Derek McLane’s set.
The lighting is by David Lander and the projections by David Bengali, with costumes by Dede Ayite and sound by Bobby McElver. The eight actors are Scott Barrow, Michelle Beck, Michael Cerveris, Kathleen Chalfant, Delia Cunningham, Brandon Flynn, Montego Glover and Conrad Ricamora, each playing several parts.
Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich wrote the play, and Kaufman directs it for Tectonic Theater Project. It turns on a real album of photographs kept by an SS officer at Auschwitz, which reached an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007, and on the work of finding out who and what the pictures show. A finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, it premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in 2022, played Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop in 2024, and reaches Broadway as a co-production with La Jolla.
Previews began on November 2 and the production opened on Monday, November 9. It runs at the Barrymore Theatre, 243 West 47th Street, through Sunday, January 10, 2027. The company brought historian Rebecca Erbelding onstage at the first preview, and nineteen Holocaust survivors attended a performance the week before opening.
Production photos of Here There Are Blueberries on Broadway
For more information, visit the official website.
