The Album on 47th Street, Critics Score Here There Are Blueberries

Here There Are Blueberries opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Monday, November 9, and of the nine opening-night reviews Suite 646 read in full, seven are positive, two are mixed and none are negative. The play runs 90 minutes without an intermission, through January 10, 2027.

The title comes from a handwritten caption. On July 22, 1944, an SS officer named Karl Höcker accompanied a group of SS Helferinnen, female auxiliaries who worked as communications staff, on a day trip to the Solahütte, an SS retreat about 20 miles south of Auschwitz. In one snapshot, women in uniform sit on a deck railing holding up empty containers. Under it, someone wrote "Hier gibt es Blaubeeren." Here there are blueberries.

The picture belongs to an album of 116 photographs taken in and around Auschwitz between May 1944 and January 1945. Höcker was the adjutant to Richard Baer, the camp's last commandant. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which received the album from an anonymous donor in 2007, a former U.S. Army counterintelligence officer found it in an abandoned Frankfurt apartment after the war. The museum notes that the photographs "do not show the crimes these men were committing." There are no prisoners in them.

That absence is the play. Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich of Tectonic Theater Project built it from the museum's work to identify the album and the people in it. It premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in 2022 and played New York Theatre Workshop in 2024 before this Broadway transfer, with Kaufman directing.

What Did the Critics Say?

Mostly that it lands. We sorted each review ourselves by its overall verdict and by what it said about three things, the projected photographs, the play's framing as a museum detective story, and the performances.

Seven of the nine are clearly positive. Frank Scheck of New York Stage Review gave it five stars and wrote, "Attendance should be mandatory." His colleague at the same site, David Finkle, gave it four and called it more a lecture than a play, but a necessary one. Christian Lewis of New York Theatre Guide called it a masterpiece. Matthew Wexler of 1 Minute Critic and Thom Geier of Culture Sauce each gave five stars. Hayley Levitt at TheaterMania and Jonathan Mandell at New York Theater were also firmly in favor.

The two mixed reviews share a complaint. Joey Sims of Theatrely found the opening detective-story scenes forced and the projections hard to connect with on a stage the size of the Barrymore's, though he concluded the show "does prove a stirring piece of theater." Robert Hofler of TheWrap admired the photographs and wrote of the cast, "The actors on stage are something less." He also argued that Höcker's history was better known to scholars than the play's mystery framing suggests.

Six of the nine single out the projected images for praise.

The Pictures Win, the Frame Divides

The count by theme is where the reviews agree most. Six of the nine single out the projected images, designed by David Bengali, for praise. Even Hofler, the toughest of the group, gives the photographs the credit he withholds from the staging.

The framing splits critics more than the verdicts suggest. Sims and Hofler both fault it directly. Finkle's lecture line is a milder version of the same note. On the other side, Levitt called the mystery structure "oddly satisfying," and Geier praised the archivist-as-detective angle as a celebration of museum work.

One performer comes up again and again. Kathleen Chalfant, who plays a Holocaust survivor and museum volunteer, is singled out in four of the nine reviews, by Sims, Hofler, Levitt and Lewis. Hofler, who liked the acting least, still wrote that she alone brought a modicum of understatement to it. Brandon Flynn's monologue as Rainer Höss, grandson of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, drew praise from Sims and Hofler as well.

How We Counted

We started from BroadwayWorld's review roundup, which links 14 notices, and opened each one on November 10. We counted only the nine we could read in full. The other five could not be opened or are paywalled, and they are left out rather than guessed at. A critic's verdict is our reading of the whole review, not a star rating alone, and only four of the nine gave stars. A theme counts only when the critic made a clear point about it.

What to Know Before You Go

The Barrymore is at 243 West 47th Street. The run is a limited engagement, and the published closing date is January 10, 2027, which gives the production 62 days from opening night. For the post-show conversations the producers announced in October, see our story on the Barrymore talkbacks. The Broadway League's figures for the week ending November 15, the show's first full week after opening, will be the first sign of whether a 90-minute documentary play can hold a Broadway house through the holidays.

The women on the railing are still holding up their empty containers. Every night at the Barrymore, a room full of strangers looks back.