The reviews are in for Here There Are Blueberries, which opened on Broadway on Monday, November 9, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman, who wrote it with Amanda Gronich and members of the Tectonic Theater Project, the Pulitzer finalist follows archivists at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as they investigate an album of snapshots showing SS officers and staff at leisure at Auschwitz, with not one prisoner in frame. Two years after its Off-Broadway run at New York Theatre Workshop, the notices are largely admiring and in places rapturous. Where the critics part company is on whether the play does enough with its extraordinary material: the enthusiasts praise its restraint, while the skeptics, Vulture and TheWrap chief among them, find the drama around the photographs thinner than the photographs themselves.
The verdict: eleven reviews in, and four of them put a score on it: New York Stage Review, Culture Sauce and 1 Minute Critic all give it 5 out of 5, and Time Out New York 4. The warmth runs well beyond the scorers, with New York Theatre Guide calling it a masterpiece and TheaterMania and New York Theater close behind. The dissent is about the play rather than the subject. Vulture finds its focus too narrow, TheWrap thinks the photographs upstage the performers, and Deadline sees a thinner drama than its material, though it calls the result vital. Two things come up again and again: David Bengali’s projections of the Höcker album are the evening’s most powerful presence, and Brandon Flynn, as the grandson of Rudolf Höss, is the performance most often singled out.
What are critics saying about Here There Are Blueberries?
The New York Times
"Beyond These Frames, the Holocaust’s Horrors"
Reviewer: Helen Shaw
Helen Shaw writes about the evening’s most harrowing passages, in which actors step into the testimony of real people caught up in Auschwitz: Delia Cunningham as the survivor Lili Jacob, Michael Cerveris as the son of the camp’s chief SS doctor.
"Agony pulses through them. The actors try to keep still but quiver as they testify"
She describes a show that works almost like a documentary film, the Tectonic Theater Project assembling expert testimony around the album’s actual images on screens across the stage.
Vulture
"On Broadway, Here There Are Blueberries Keeps Its Focus Narrow"
Reviewer: Jackson McHenry
Jackson McHenry is the most skeptical voice here. He grants the staging its precision and the cast its quality, and singles out Brandon Flynn’s wolfish turn as the grandson of Rudolf Höss and the stunning reversal of the Lili Jacob testimony.
"It sets its lens on a difficult subject, but crops out its difficulty."
His complaint is scope: the play arrives at a conclusion most of its audience already holds, and leaves its own closing question, about who we are in this story, unanswered against the present day.
Deadline
"Evil As Banal As Fruit"
Reviewer: Greg Evans
Greg Evans thinks the play can look slight beside the overwhelming material it handles, and finds some of its suspense manufactured, the museum board’s hesitation above all.
"…those quibbles with dramaturgy shouldn’t diminish the real achievement that is Here There Are Blueberries."
He praises a uniformly excellent cast, with Brandon Flynn the stand-out and Kathleen Chalfant reason enough to go, and credits Derek McLane’s set and the projection, lighting and sound design with an earned mood of dread.
TheWrap
"No Actor Can Upstage These Nazi Photos"
Reviewer: Robert Hofler
Robert Hofler’s headline is his verdict: the photographs are unforgettable, and the play works better in a big Broadway house than it did Off Broadway.
"Kaufman’s placement and display of those photographs is nothing short of brilliant."
He is much cooler on the rest, calling the museum debate a contrivance and the descendants’ interviews canned, and he finds most of the cast pushing too hard, with Kathleen Chalfant the exception for her understatement.
TheaterMania
"Here There Are Blueberries Takes a Snapshot of the Banality of Evil"
Reviewer: Hayley Levitt
Hayley Levitt calls it a powerful piece of historical drama, and credits its restraint: a design team that stays out of the way and lets the images speak.
"…adding the propulsion of a mystery novel to an exceptionally engaging history seminar."
She picks out Michael Cerveris in a gripping scene with Conrad Ricamora, and Flynn’s monologue, though she wishes so deep a bench of actors were let out of their recitations more often.
Time Out New York
"Here There Are Blueberries is a feast of strange fruit"
Reviewer: Adam Feldman · 4 out of 5
Adam Feldman finds it chilling and fascinating, a detective story in which the killers are hiding in plain sight, and sets it beside the film The Zone of Interest.
"A picture can tell a thousand words and leave six million unspoken."
He admits it can resemble a well-made podcast, but says the theatrical form and an ensemble playing with simplicity and restraint give it a human dimension, and a universal one: anyone could be these people.
New York Stage Review
"Riveting Documentary Theater"
Reviewer: Frank Scheck · 5 out of 5
Frank Scheck is the most emphatic of the critics. He finds the play riveting for all 90 minutes, never dry despite the exposition, and singles out the shutter clicks that greet each photograph and the climactic sequence that finally turns to the victims.
"Attendance should be mandatory for Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich’s extraordinary documentary theater piece"
The whole eight-member ensemble is superb, he says, and he hopes the run goes on past January. (The site’s second critic, David Finkle, gave it 4 out of 5.)
Culture Sauce
"‘Here There Are Blueberries’ turns Auschwitz snapshots into a haunting study of complicity"
Reviewer: Thom Geier · 5 out of 5
Thom Geier reads the play partly as a tribute to archivists and researchers, cast here as bookish detectives, and admires how it explains the mentality of the camp’s functionaries without excusing them.
"Here There Are Blueberries gains its power from its even-keeled approach, eschewing the maudlin for a professorial restraint."
He calls Delia Cunningham’s eight-strong cast superlative, and concludes that the drama leaves no one in the audience outside the question of culpability.
1 Minute Critic
"When a picture is worth a thousand unspeakable words"
Reviewer: Matthew Wexler · 5 out of 5
Matthew Wexler opens with his own Sunday-school memory of Holocaust footage, and finds this play asking something different of its audience. He credits David Bengali’s treatment of the images with unfolding the story in harrowing detail.
"This play asks something harder: that we see what happened outside the frame, and who we’d be inside it."
He notes that this is not a play of heightened emotion or big character work, and counts that restraint as its strength.
New York Theatre Guide
"Docudrama masterfully confronts the mundanity of evil"
Reviewer: Christian Lewis
Christian Lewis praises Kaufman’s direction as subtle and poised and calls Delia Cunningham outstanding, with Ricamora, Montego Glover, Michelle Beck and especially Chalfant standing out in the ensemble.
"Here There Are Blueberries is a masterpiece, a stirring, evocative, and politically urgent work of art"
He finds it hard to sit through, and says that discomfort is exactly the point; the Lili Jacob monologue is, for him, the most moving passage of the night.
Read Christian Lewis’s full review at New York Theatre Guide
New York Theater
Reviewer: Jonathan Mandell
Jonathan Mandell notes that the Broadway opening fell on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, and reads the play as a prompt to think about complacency and complicity now.
"…this exemplary documentary theater from Moises Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project"
He values its way into the Holocaust through the perpetrators, without sensationalizing it, and the closing turn to the victims’ own photographs, which he reads as the play honoring them.
Production photographs by Matthew Murphy.
For a first look at the production, see our production photos from Here There Are Blueberries at the Barrymore, and for more of what the New York critics have been saying this week, see our roundup for Wanted at the James Earl Jones Theatre.
Here There Are Blueberries is playing at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 West 47th Street, through January 10, 2027. For more information, visit the official website.
