Sarna Lapine is a New York-based director of musicals, operas, and plays. She is currently focused on developing new work as well as radically re-imagined revivals.

Recent credits include Fiddler on the Roof performed with The Philadelphia Orchestra; Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine (Spotlight on Plays); the world premiere of Kate Hamill’s Dracula (Classic Stage Company); the New York premiere of Kate Hamill’s Little Women (Primary Stages); as well as The Rape of Lucretia (Boston Lyric Opera), named Best Opera of 2019 by the Boston Globe.

Lapine directed the critically-acclaimed Broadway revival of Sunday in the Park with George starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford, which reopened the Hudson Theatre on Broadway.

In addition to working on Broadway, Lapine has worked regionally, Off-Broadway and internationally, including the Japanese premiere of Anna Ziegler’s Photograph 51. Touring productions include: the North American tour and Japanese premiere of The National Theatre’s WarHorse; Dirty Dancing North American tour; and the second national tour of Lincoln Center Theater’s Tony Award winning revival, South Pacific. Concerts include: 4-Stars in Osaka and Tokyo, Japan; two Sondheim concerts with the Boston Pops starring Ruthie Ann Miles, Carmen Cusack and Phillip Boykin; as well as Sondheim on Sondheim at The Hollywood Bowl, starring Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jonathan Groff and Vanessa Williams.

Lapine has been a guest artist at Juilliard, Fordham University, the Hartt School at University of Hartford, and BMI. She has been a guest speaker at Rutgers University, CalArts, and Mountview Academy, and has taught at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York. She holds an MFA in film from Columbia University.

Her first documentary short film My Saraab, about a political refugee from Iraq, won best short film at the Northwest Film Forum in 2005 and was accepted at the Big Sky Documentary film festival, Beverly Hills Shorts Festival, Arab & Iranian Film Festival, and Northwest Folklife.

Lapine served as Bartlett Sher’s assistant and associate director on Lincoln Center Theater’s Broadway productions of The Light in the Piazza; South Pacific; Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown; and Awake and Sing!.

Before a career in theater, Lapine worked in arts and outdoor education in Seattle, WA. She was a mountaineering and rock-climbing guide for the Pacific Northwest Outward Bound School, as well as Program Director for a nonprofit called Powerful Voices, designed to teach sex education to girls in the juvenile justice system. Lapine transformed the latter program through a new curriculum promoting self-expression through the arts. In conjunction with a researcher at the University of Washington, she helped address teen motherhood, addiction, and sexual assault issues.

Resume available upon request.

Theatermania’s Artist to Artist - The Art Of Directing with Bartlett Sher and Sarna Lapine