[8] From 1987 to 1996, Lavelli was head of the Théâtre national de la Colline in Paris and gave it a focus on contemporary plays.

[4] Lavelli also staged plays by Shakespeare, Corneille, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Schnitzler, Brecht, Eugène Ionesco, Pirandello, Dürrenmatt, Thomas Bernhard, O'Neill, George Tabori, Chekhov, and Bulgakov.

[1][9] He directed 20th-century operas, such as Rolf Liebermann's Medea, Maurice Ohana's La Célestine, Salome by Richard Strauss, Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, and works by Bartók, Gottfried von Einem, Luigi Nono, Prokofiev and Heinrich Sutermeister.

He also directed at the Paris Opera classical repertoire such as Gounod's Faust; the 1975 production set during World War I was reprised 13 times until 2003.

[4] He also staged there Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, Puccini's Madame Butterfly, Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges, and Handel's Ariodante.

[5] He staged Handel's Siroe at La Fenice in Venice in 2000), Xavier Montsalvatge's Babel 46 at the Teatro Real in Madrid in 2002, Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples in 2003, the world premiere of Zygmunt Krauze's Polieukt in Warsaw in 2010 and the Capitole de Toulouse in 2011, Wagner's Rienzi in Toulouse in 2012, Mozart's Idomeneo at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in 2014, the world premiere of Martín Matalon's L'Ombre de Venceslas, an opera based on Copi's play, at the Opéra de Rennes in a coproduction with Toulouse in 2016, and Janáček's Jenůfa at the Municipal Theatre of Santiago in 2017.