Lincoln Center Theater, a leading nonprofit theater with a long track record of producing luxe Broadway musical revivals as well as contemporary plays, has chosen new leadership for the first time in more than three decades.
The theater’s next artistic director will be Lear deBessonet, 44, a stage director who specializes in musical revivals as the artistic director of the Encores! program at New York City Center. DeBessonet will succeed André Bishop, who has led Lincoln Center Theater since 1992, most recently with the title of producing artistic director; he is retiring in June.
DeBessonet will work with Bartlett Sher, 65, a Tony-winning director who is a resident director at the organization, and who will now assume the title of executive producer. DeBessonet will select and oversee the theater’s shows and its day-to-day operations; Sher will focus on strategic planning, fund-raising and global partnerships. They will both report to the board’s chairman, Kewsong Lee.
In an interview, DeBessonet said that “there is no greater job I can imagine” than running Lincoln Center Theater. “The American theater is the great passion of my life,” she said. “I’ve wanted to be a director and to run a theater since I was a 5-year-old in Baton Rouge.”
The changes come amid a tidal wave of turnover throughout the American theater, prompted by a variety of factors, including the retirements of many regional and Off Broadway theater pioneers, as well as the ousters of some leaders who lost support. Across the industry, leaders are facing a new reality: These jobs have become increasingly challenging as nonprofits face rising costs, dwindled audiences, pressures to feature programming that advances social justice but also sells tickets, and changing entertainment consumption habits.
Lincoln Center Theater, with an annual budget of about $40 million and about 55 employees, says it is financially healthy at a time when much of the industry is struggling.
“Lincoln Center Theater is the pre-eminent not-for-profit theater in America, with the good fortune of a significant endowment and strong resources,” said Lee, the board chairman. “We are in great shape, but not immune to the difficulties the industry is facing, which is why it’s so important for our new leadership to enable us to evolve and change.”
The theater’s Tony-winning productions have included revivals of the musicals “The King and I” and “South Pacific” and stagings of the plays “Oslo” and “The Coast of Utopia.” Its newest Broadway production, “McNeal,” an A.I.-themed play starring Robert Downey Jr., is now in previews.
It has the only Broadway stage that is not located in Midtown — the Vivian Beaumont, which is at the Lincoln Center campus on the Upper West Side. The organization also has an Off Broadway stage, the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, and a rooftop Off Off Broadway venue, the Claire Tow Theater.
DeBessonet, a native of Baton Rouge, La., is a longtime proponent of the idea that theater can create community and further social change. This interest led her to create the Public Theater’s Public Works program: musical pageants adapted from classic works and featuring a mix of professional and amateur performers. Many of those productions, often staged outdoors around Labor Day, have been artistic successes, and the program has been adopted by other theaters around the country and in Britain.
Her tenure at Encores! has been a bit of a roller coaster. She started in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and her earliest productions underwhelmed critics and alienated some audience members who felt that politics was being prioritized over storytelling. But she found her footing with a rapturously received revival of “Into the Woods” that transferred to Broadway, and followed that with one success after another; her Encores! production of “Once Upon a Mattress” is now running on Broadway. She has committed to directing one more production for Encores!: A starry revival of “Ragtime” this fall.
In recent years she has become ever more interested in the idea that the arts can create public health benefits, and she conceived this summer’s 18-city Arts for EveryBody project, modeled after the Federal Theater Project.
What does she hope to accomplish at Lincoln Center Theater? “I feel very passionate about holding strong to the great legacy André has created,” she said, “producing new plays, new musicals, revivals and classics, in a rich balance.” She also hopes to focus on “creating theater that is an event — that is unmistakably different than watching Netflix on your couch.”
She said she will seek to expand, but not replace, the theater’s audience. “People create a false binary: ‘Do you want to retain the audience that’s there or find a new audience?’” she said. “I want every person that has come to Lincoln Center Theater before to keep coming and to find satisfaction and delight, and I also want to continue to widen the embrace. I don’t see those things as oppositional.”
Sher, who has been directing at Lincoln Center Theater for two decades and who has been on staff for 15 years, said, “I’m primarily here to support Lear.” He said he believes that his experience will allow him to provide a measure of continuity as the leadership changes, and also said he wants to “give back” to the theater industry by helping secure its financial position.
Both deBessonet and Sher said they expect to continue to direct shows.
Lincoln Center Theater is one of four nonprofits that have their own Broadway houses, and is the second of those to name new leadership this year. Second Stage Theater recently named Evan Cabnet (who previously ran Lincoln Center Theater’s Off Off Broadway programming) as its new artistic director, following the 45-year tenure of Carole Rothman; Roundabout Theater Company is expected soon to name a successor to Todd Haimes, who ran that theater for 40 years until his death last year. Manhattan Theater Club continues to be led by Lynne Meadow, who has run that organization for more than 50 years.
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