Rehearsals began on Monday for the Broadway premiere of Here There Are Blueberries, Tectonic Theater Project's Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the engagement at the Barrymore Theatre is a strictly limited ten weeks: previews from Monday, November 2, opening night on Monday, November 9, and a final performance on Sunday, January 10, 2027.
The eight actors, named on October 5 as the company went into rehearsal, are Scott Barrow, Michelle Beck, Michael Cerveris, Kathleen Chalfant, Delia Cunningham, Brandon Flynn, Montego Glover and Conrad Ricamora. Each plays several parts, which is how the play is built; the principal roles go to Cerveris as Peter Wirths, Chalfant as Judy Cohen, Flynn as Rainer Höss, Glover as Melita Maschmann, Ricamora as Tilman Taube, Barrow as Karl Höcker, Beck as Charlotte Schünzel and Cunningham as Rebecca Erbelding. Jeanne Sakata, Anna Shafer, Marrick Smith and Grant James Varjas are the understudies.
The billing leans on awards: Cerveris has two Tonys, for Assassins and Fun Home; Chalfant has three OBIEs; Glover, whose Broadway credits include Memphis, and Ricamora, nominated for Oh, Mary!, are both Tony nominees. More telling, for a piece of documentary theater, is how much of the company has lived with the material. Barrow and Varjas were among the Tectonic members who devised the play, and Chalfant, Cunningham, Sakata, Shafer and Smith are also members of the company. Cunningham, who toured with the play, makes her Broadway debut here.
The play was written by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, and Kaufman conceived and directs it. Its starting point is a true one. In 2007 an archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was sent an album of Nazi-era photographs unlike anything the museum had seen, and the effort to establish what the pictures showed, and who was in them, became a public argument that went well beyond the building. The play follows that inquiry, and what it exposes about the perpetrators of the Holocaust and about those who look at the images now. The Pulitzer board, naming it a 2024 drama finalist, called it “an elegant and harrowing work of documentary theater.”
Broadway is the end of a long road. The play had its first workshop production at Miami New Drama and its world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse in 2022, then reached New York in 2024 in a co-production at New York Theatre Workshop, where it won two Lucille Lortel Awards, Outstanding Play among them, and drew Outer Critics Circle and Drama League nominations. La Jolla Playhouse, where it premiered, is a co-producer of the Broadway staging.
The design team is Derek McLane (scenic), Dede Ayite (costumes), David Lander (lighting), Bobby McElver (sound) and David Bengali (projections), with casting by Stephanie Yankwitt, CSA, dramaturgy by Amy Marie Seidel and Erin Albrecht as production stage manager. The producers are Tectonic Theater Project, Brian & Dayna Lee, Bruce Roberts, Sue Vaccaro and Ricky Stevens, with 101 Productions, Ltd./Chris Morey as executive producer, in association with Michael Hormel and Midnight Theatricals.
Tickets are on sale now through Telecharge, and the Barrymore box office opens on Monday, October 19.
