Bartlett Sher

Bartlett Sher is an American theatre and opera director whose career has been closely associated with Lincoln Center Theater. Born in San Francisco, he studied at the College of the Holy Cross and later at the Yale School of Drama. Before becoming a major Broadway figure, Sher served as artistic director of Seattle’s Intiman Theatre from 2000 to 2008. At Intiman, he directed productions including William Shakespeare’s *Cymbeline*, Bertolt Brecht’s *The Threepenny Opera*, and Tony Kushner’s *The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures*. Sher became a resident director at Lincoln Center Theater in 2008. His staging of Clifford Odets’s *Awake and Sing!* opened on Broadway in 2006 after an earlier production at the company and won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play. He subsequently directed Lincoln Center’s Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s *South Pacific* in 2008. The production, featuring Kelli O’Hara as Nellie Forbush and Paulo Szot as Emile de Becque, won seven Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical; Sher received the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical. His other Broadway work includes David Finkle and Michael Korie’s *The Light in the Piazza*, which transferred to Broadway in 2005 after its Goodman Theatre premiere. Sher directed the 2009 Broadway revival of August Wilson’s *Joe Turner’s Come and Gone*, the 2012 revival of Clifford Odets’s *Golden Boy* with Seth Numrich, and the 2015 Broadway revival of *The King and I*, starring Kelli O’Hara and Ken Watanabe. *The King and I* won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical, and O’Hara won Best Actress in a Musical for her performance as Anna Leonowens. In 2017, Sher directed J. T. Rogers’s *Oslo* at Lincoln Center Theater and on Broadway. The play dramatizes the secret Norwegian negotiations that led to the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. It won the Tony Award for Best Play. Sher also directed the 2018 Broadway revival of *My Fair Lady*, led by Lauren Ambrose and Harry Hadden-Paton, and Aaron Sorkin’s stage adaptation of Harper Lee’s *To Kill a Mockingbird*, which opened on Broadway in 2018 with Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch. In opera, his productions have included Mozart’s *Le nozze di Figaro* and Offenbach’s *Les Contes d’Hoffmann* at the Metropolitan Opera.