Bartlett Sher, Tony Award-winning director, to leave Intiman

After nearly a decade as the high-profile artistic director of Seattle's Intiman Theatre, Bartlett Sher says he will depart the post in December 2010.

As his star ascended in the theater world, Sher also added national luster to Intiman's reputation as an incubator of new plays and musicals that went on to wider success.

Intiman revealed Sher already has helped select a theater artist who will work in tandem with him this season and next, with the intention of then taking over Sher's job. The likely successor will be identified by Intiman next month.

Sher's leave-taking has been a topic of much speculation in the local arts community since he began to earn national and international acclaim for his opera and theater productions and spend less time in Seattle.

Sher this month received his fourth Tony Award nomination since 2005, this one for his staging of a lauded 2009 Broadway revival of "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," by the late Seattle dramatist August Wilson.

In 2008, Sher won the Tony for best director of a musical for a smash-hit Broadway version of "South Pacific."

Sher also guided Intiman to a 2006 Tony Award for regional theater excellence. And the company has shared in the success of the Adam Guettel-Craig Lucas musical "The Light in the Piazza," which premiered at Intiman in 2003 and won a Tony for best original score on Broadway under Sher's direction.

Rumors about Sher's exit heated up recently when he took on a second job as resident director at New York's Lincoln Center Theater. Last year he moved with his wife, actress Kristin Flanders, and their young daughter Lucia to Brooklyn. (The couple's second daughter, Phoebe, was born three months ago.)

Speaking by phone from New York, Sher said he had hoped to keep up his cross-country duties until "last summer, when I was [directing an opera] in Salzburg, and commuting back and forth from Europe, and I began wondering how I could balance everything."

"Given the way my schedule was lining up for the next three years," he said, "there was no way I could keep doing all this. And I didn't want to put Intiman in peril, because it's a wonderful theater."

Sher also has opted out of directing Shakespeare's "Othello" this summer at Intiman, as he had planned. The theater instead will bring in an acclaimed staging of the play from New York's Theatre for a New Audience.

Intiman board of directors President Kim A. Anderson said Sher informed the board of his intentions last fall.

Together with Sher, the board chose his putative successor, who will join the staff this year as an associate director. Anderson said the person will run the theater in 2010 as a co-director with Sher (who will take a voluntary cut in pay) and then be named sole artistic director.

Anderson said current Intiman associate director Sheila Daniels and new managing director Brian Colburn intend to stay on at the theater.

Though Anderson would not name the new hire, she said it is an artist who is "familiar with our theater and has directed here several times but not in the last few years."

Most nonprofit theaters conduct a national search for a new leader, without direct involvement by the departing artistic head.

But Anderson said Intiman's trustees felt that would be too "expensive, time-consuming and disruptive. It just seemed like all the pieces fit together this way. And with a traditional search would we come up with someone better? We didn't think so."

After he hands over the reins, Sher said, he still wants to help raise money for the Intiman and guest-direct.

"Intiman gave me an enormous opportunity to create theater for a great audience," he said. "That's why I've had so much ambivalence about leaving. Seattle provided me with the best of what a community can offer an artist — an openness, an honesty, a willingness to go on an adventure. ... It meant the world to me."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com

In the original version of this story, published on May 19, 2009, it incorrectly stated that "The Light in the Piazza" won a Tony for best musical; it was nominated, but did not win. Corrected on May 19, 2009.