New Orleanian Michael Cerveris stars on Broadway in ‘Here There Are Blueberries’
By ALAN SMASON, Exclusive to the CCJN
Michael Cerveris, a two-time Tony Award winner who has called New Orleans home for most of the past two decades, left the city early in the summer, expecting to be gone for just a few weeks. Now, three months later, he has not only failed to return home, but is preparing to star in the Broadway premiere of “Here There Are Blueberries” by Moíses Kaufman and Amanda Gronich later tonight, November 9.
Michael Cerveris in “Here There Are Blueberries,” opening tonight on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. (Photo by Matthew Murphy)
A native of Huntington, West Virginia, Cerveris had been invited along with his brother to take part in a community theatre production there of “1776” being put on by the very company the two had starred in as youngsters. Shortly after the production ended, he accepted an invitation to work with Brooklyn-based The Goat Exchange and their world premiere production of “Radio Bette.” The show was first being rehearsed in New York prior to a slated run in Dublin at the Gaiety Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival in late September.
After a short return to New York, he expected to be back home again to root for his New Orleans Saints, who would be playing a regular season NFL game in Paris, France in late October. But as any actor knows, sometimes fate, in football terms, decides to call an audible.
The actor had no sooner finished his performances in Europe when he received a fateful phone call from the “Here There Are Blueberries,” producing team. The team, which includes Sue Vaccaro, a Tony Award winning who also calls New Orleans home, wanted to know if he could join the production that was about to begin rehearsals.
“I got called about this and it was just too good an opportunity to pass up,” Cerveris admitted in a phone interview with the CCJN.
The documentary play by Kaufman and Gronich was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2024. It is a latter-day detective story that concerns a unique World War II era photo album mysteriously donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Kaufman, who wrote “The Laramie Project,” one of the most-performed and noteworthy plays of the past quarter century, first became aware of the photo album when he read about its unusual donation on the front page of the New York Times. He then approached Gronich about turning it into a play.
What made this photo album so unusual was that the pictures did not document the victims of the Holocaust but, rather, showed the perpetrators and architects of the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp living out their otherwise normal lives. The archivist team at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum immediately recognized the individuals in the photos for who they were, but as the play reveals, it created a question within the archivist team as to whether they were abandoning their mission to document the Holocaust victims by researching their killers.
All of the cast members play multiple roles. “Really, all of us – our primary characters – are as the archivists,” Cerveris added. “We’re kinda all performing the detective work that went on at the National Holocaust Memorial Museum and then, as the story unfolds, we assume the personas of some of the various people who are seen in the photographs or documents that are read or other specialists in the field.”
New Orleanian Michael Cerveris, a two-time Tony Award winner, second from left, poses with two women Holocaust survivors following a preview performance of “Here There Are Blueberries.” (Photo courtesy “Here There Are Blueberries”)
His primary role is that of Peter Wirths. Wirths’ father, Dr. Eduard Wirths, was the chief SS doctor at the Auchwitz-Birkenau complex. He supervised all the other doctors at the death camps including Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called “Angel of Death,” who determined which new arrivals would be permitted to labor at the camps and which would be sent immediately to the gas chambers. While Dr. Wirths did not conduct experiments on prisoners himself, he did authorize their activities.
“There’s a scene where he (Peter Wirths) meets with a descendant of another Nazi doctor and they have a conversation about it,” Cerveris continued. “Their ancestors had actually performed the same job at Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz and there’a photo of the two of them meeting and having a conversation at Auschwitz.”
Cerveris also plays the role of the United States Army Lt. Colonel, who serendipitously discovered the photo album during the U.S. occupation, but mysteriously kept it for decades before sending it to the museum.
In the play it is never completely detailed as to why the retired officer kept the photo album and what compelled him to send it in so many years later.
But such details are left for the audience to figure out on its own and Cerveris says he can accept that. “With lots of good mysteries, not every single thread is tied up,” he said.
As of opening night, the actor says he expects to still be away from the Crescent City through the end of the play’s 10-week limited run.
“I look forward when I get to come back (to New Orleans), but it is really terrific being part of this piece, especially at this time,” he mused. “It has so much to say in an apolitical way. It doesn’t have a particular agenda. It’s not trying to force any particular narrative. It’s simply – as good museums do – stating the facts of something that happened and it lets the audience sort of draw very vivid parallels today in this country, in the Middle East and around the world.”
“Here There Are Blueberries” has previously played twice previously in Miami and enjoyed national tours and local productions across the United States. It also had a successful run in London this past year.
The play also enjoyed record-breaking runs in New York for a joint production between the New York Workshop Theatre and Tectonic Theatre Project, which was founded by Kaufman.
Over the course of development of the project, many of the previous cast members had toured the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to meet with the archivists there. But coming to the production so close to its opening meant Cerveris was not able to do so.
But the actor does not necessarily think it will in any way limit his performance, and hopes to tour it after the play closes in January. “Even though I haven’t been there myself, I feel like I’m just one step away from people who have very vivid knowledge and experience of being there,” he explained.
Delia Cunnigham, left, who plays Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist Rebecca Erbelding in “Here There Are Blueberries” welcomes the real Erbelding, center, to a preview audience of the documentary play as actress Kathleen Chalfant looks on. (Photo courtesy “Here There Are Blueberries”)
“I have a real strong desire to do that now ,especially since we’ve met Rebecca Erbelding, who’s the principal character in the story,” he continued. “She’s come up a couple time to visit with us, so yeah, I really do look forward to going.” (Erbelding was a guest of the producers at a recent preview performance last week.)
So, while a trip back to New Orleans is out of the question at present, he is having a grand time taking on the several roles he plays in “Here There Are Blueberries.” “It’s really wonderful to be a part of this company doing this kind of work,” he hastened to point out.
Prior to tonight’s opening, the Broadway cast members were all named members of the Tectonic Theatre Project which Kaufman founded. While tectonic usually refers to seismic events, Kaufman made it part of the title of his theatre ensemble to emphasize their mission of building and constructing new groundbreaking theatre work.
“What Tectonic and what Moíses have always been interested in is not just the stories that they tell, which are important and very provocative and can be moving,” Cerveris said, “but it is also looking at the form of theater and how theatre can expand and change its shape to suit the story that it’s telling for an audience.”
The actor won his first Tony Award while playing John Wilkes Booth in Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins” in 2004 and his second in 2015 as the closeted father of lesbian cartoonist Alison Buchdel in “Fun Home.” He confided that this kind of experimental work in theatre was what he had expected to be doing when he first became a New York actor.
“It’s different than any other work that I’ve done,” he said. “It’s more like the work that I grew up with and went to school and college, thinking I would be doing in the downtown theatre world, which was what I expected to be doing my whole career.”
Instead, Cerveris found fame in 1993 as the title character in “The Who’s ‘Tommy’” on Broadway. He followed a few years later as the first replacement for John Cameron Mitchell in the title role for the off-Broadway hit “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” Today, Mitchell, like Cerveris, also calls New Orleans home.
In the intervening years, Cerveris became a noted interpreter of Stephen Sondheim’s work starring in many Broadway and off-Broadway roles and in concert appearances of the composer and lyricist’s work. This included his role as the titular character in the 2005 revival of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” opposite Patti LuPone.
“It was a surprise to me that I would end up in not just commercial theatre, period, but in musical theatre and on Broadway,” he said. “It’s really exciting to me to get to do a piece like this, which is very much kind of downtown art theatre piece, but on Broadway in the middle of the commercial theater (district).”
Nineteen Holocaust survivors were preview guests of the producers at “Here There Are Blueberries.” (Photo courtesy “Here There Are Blueberries”)
As the archivists at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the actors in the play deliberately and painstakingly reveal each of the shadowy figures seen in the photograph album and the truth behind them they know. The result is a journey back in time and a unique theatrical experience for the audience. the actor said he cherishes.
The actor said he cherishes the ability to take the audience on this trip. “Just being able to be a part of something that invites the audience to ask some very important questions of themselves and of the world around us on stage in the middle of Broadway,” he said. “I think that’s sadly all too rare thing these days and I’m really happy to be a part of it.”
While the play was seen off-Broadway in 2024, the award-winning actor thinks it is even more relevant to today’s Broadway audiences. “Even in the two years since this was last done, the world has changed a tremendous amount and in most ways not for the better,” he opined.
“I think this play is going to land differently that it has before for that reason. You put it in a really visible place like a Broadway theater, I think you attract a different kind of attention.”
The Ethel Barrymore Theatre has a capacity of 1,058 seats, considered a small- to medium-size Broadway theater. Over the past week the show that has been playing to packed – and in many cases sold out – preview audiences. Prior to their opening their doors to audiences, the cast remarked as to the intimacy of the theater and how close they felt from the stage to the back of the house, Cerveris said.
“The scale of the set and the projection of the photographs is pretty huge at some points and I think the audience is going to feel very much sent to the heart of the album,” he concluded.
“Here There Are Blueberries” (One and a half hours with no intermission) by Moíses Kaufman and Amanda Gronich opens tonight at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th Street on Broadway. For tickets through Telecharge, click here.
