Casual Broadway fans may best know Bartlett Sher for his probing, luminous interpretations of classic American musicals and plays, from the 2008 staging of “South Pacific” that earned the theater and opera director a Tony Award to revivals of other Rodgers and Hammerstein gems and works by Clifford Odets and August Wilson. Most recently, Mr. Sher helmed a new stage adaptation of “To Kill A Mockingbird,” with a text by Oscar-winning screenwriter and playwright Aaron Sorkin. 

Yet Mr. Sher’s vast range of projects has also included plenty of original works. This season, the director is juggling one such outing, Sharr White’s new play “Pictures From Home,” with another dip into the musical theater canon: a Lincoln Center Theater production of Lerner and Loewe’s “Camelot,” featuring a fresh libretto by Mr. Sorkin. 

“Pictures,” set to open Thursday, is based on Larry Sultan’s 1992 photo memoir of the same title, which traced the late photographer’s parents and their relationship through snapshots, home movie stills, and interviews. In Mr. White’s play, Larry — portrayed here by theater favorite Danny Burstein, whom Mr. Sher has directed in several productions, including his acclaimed 2015 revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” — clashes with his father in his attempts to find deeper truths in the footage, and the lives it represents.

“On this profound level for me, the play is about this question of representation in history,” Mr. Sher says. “Right now we’re all re-investigating our history as a nation, asking enormous questions and rethinking them totally. In the play, you have that kind of perspective compressed to the world of a single family. It’s very complex, these layers of how do we see and show who we are, and what do we think we see beneath the surface? Those questions, on a subtextual level, were of enormous importance to me.”

Mr. Sher, who has one teenage daughter and another in her 20s, adds, “One of the fears we have as parents is that our history will be rewritten.” He muses that Larry is “in some ways like an early version of a social media guy. It’s the late ’80s, early ’90s, and he’s trying to document everything, to rethink it and make something of it and publish that. And his parents are like, ‘But this is our family.’”

Larry’s parents are played by the celebrated veterans Zoë Wanamaker and Nathan Lane, while projections showcase the real Sultans. “I liked the theatricality of that,” Mr. Sher says, “that there was this sort of meta-level where the people on stage weren’t the people in the pictures, and there was interaction with the photographs.”

Mr. Sher had never directed Mr. Lane before, and notes, “I’ve been very lucky to work with some extraordinary artists — in theater, in musical theater, in opera — and I don’t know anybody quite in the same category as Nathan. He can take a line and do almost anything with it. He’s an incredible comic, but he can turn on a dime and make it a tragic moment. The really great actors can turn a whole building into one living room where we all just gather around and listen, and his generosity and clarity and dedication are just extraordinary.”

For “Camelot,” scheduled to begin previews March 9 and open April 13, Mr. Sher recruited a trio of younger actors with impressive resumes to lead his company. Andrew Burnap, a Tony winner for his performance in 2019’s “The Inheritance,” plays King Arthur, with Phillipa Soo, a star of the original cast of “Hamilton,” portraying Guenevere. Rising musical and television star Jordan Donica, a featured actor in Mr. Sher’s production of Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady” a few years back, plays Lancelot Du Lac, the knight whose love for the queen imperils both Arthur’s marriage and his high-minded political vision.

The new book developed by Mr. Sorkin does not, Mr. Sher points out, depart radically from the original, which Alan Jay Lerner wrote along with the show’s lyrics. “The story you know is not very far from the story you’re going to see; it’s just been developed with a little more precision and depth.”

Having first arrived on Broadway just after President John F. Kennedy’s election, “Camelot” will forever be associated with that more idealistic — and idealized — period in American history. Yet Mr. Sher notes, “What Jackie Kennedy did was to elevate a myth that’s not really in the actual musical. I think the place you can find resonance today is how the knights are won over to Arthur’s round table, and then it collapses. The resonance now compared to then lies in, what is the Camelot we’ve lost? How do we see the cohesiveness of our country? And whether watching it is in any way restorative, which is what you want from a great piece of theater.”

Where the roles of Arthur and Guenevere were famously introduced by Richard Burton and Julie Andrews, Mr. Sher also specifically sought American actors to play his leads. “I’m representing a Camelot that is the world we know now, as opposed to it being a specifically English story. I’m not having a bunch of Americans do English accents; we elevate the speech a bit, but we’re sort of building our own sound.”

Mr. Sher feels he is “a lucky person, in that I can do something as extraordinary and intimate as ‘Pictures From Home’ and something as large in its landscape as ‘Camelot,’ and I think they both push into the world of memory. I think the activity of theater is a kind of memory exercise; it’s checking in with national and personal myths against who you are now, and I think that activity is very much shared in these pieces. Audiences bring a huge amount of themselves to the work, so that theater can be personal and profound and entertaining at the same time — when we’re doing it at our best.”