Here There Are Blueberries Makes Its Broadway Debut at the Barrymore Theatre

Here There Are Blueberries makes its Broadway debut at the Barrymore Theatre, Deadline reported. The play first opened Off Broadway, the group of smaller theaters outside the main Broadway houses, two years before this move.

The show is a docu-drama, a play built from real events and documents. It is based on a real cache of photographs from Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland. Those photographs were submitted to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007.

The play is also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, one of the best-known awards in American theater. A finalist is one of the works a judging panel considered closely before choosing a winner.

Kathleen Chalfant is part of the cast. Delia Cunningham plays Rebecca Erbelding, an archivist, meaning a person who manages and protects historical records. Michael Cerveris plays a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, an officer who has left active military service.

For a first-time ticket buyer, a move from Off Broadway to Broadway is a change in scale. Off Broadway houses are smaller and usually cost less to run. A Broadway house carries higher weekly running costs, the regular bills for the theater, cast, and crew. Those costs have to be covered by ticket sales, and a production that has been running in one place often brings a known audience to its next stage.

Broadway runs are also financed in advance. Investors put up capitalization, meaning the money raised to get the doors open. A show is said to recoup once it has paid back that amount. Until then, every week's ticket income goes toward the debt.

Those are the financial terms that apply to any production that moves to Broadway.