Jeff Lunden
Jeff Lunden is a freelance arts reporter and producer whose stories have been heard on NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition, as well as on other public radio programs.
Lunden contributed several segments to the Peabody Award-winning series The NPR 100, and was producer of the NPR Music series Discoveries at Walt Disney Concert Hall, hosted by Renee Montagne. He has produced more than a dozen documentaries on musical theater and Tin Pan Alley for NPR — most recently A Place for Us: Fifty Years of West Side Story.
Other documentaries have profiled George and Ira Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, Harold Arlen and Jule Styne. Lunden has won several awards, including the Gold Medal from the New York Festival International Radio Broadcasting Awards and a CPB Award.
Lunden is also a theater composer. He wrote the score for the musical adaptation of Arthur Kopit's Wings (book and lyrics by Arthur Perlman), which won the 1994 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical. Other works include Another Midsummer Night, Once on a Summer's Day and adaptations of The Little Prince and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for Theatreworks/USA.
Lunden is currently working with Perlman on an adaptation of Swift as Desire, a novel of magic realism from Like Water for Chocolate author Laura Esquivel. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
-
New York City Opera has commissioned Stonewall,a new opera premiering one week before the 50th anniversary of the riots that sparked the modern gay-rights movement.
-
James Corden hosted the Tony Awards Sunday night in New York. Hadestown won 8 Tony Awards — including best musical. It's written, produced and directed by women.
-
The American Federation of Musicians' fund will reduce benefits for an estimated 20,000 of its 80,000 members due to stresses caused by the 2008 financial crisis — and a steadily aging membership.
-
Tootsie, Beetlejuiceand The Prom round up the Tony category for best musical, while The Ferryman, Gary, Ink, Choir Boy and What the Constitution Means to Me are all up for best play.
-
The New York Philharmonic launches its season with a new music director and executive director. The Metropolitan Opera's season starts with a young music director.
-
The high-school sci-fi musical got middling reviews when it premiered in New Jersey. Then teenagers on social media got a hold of it.
-
Ever since Mart Crowley's play about a gay male life premiered off-Broadway in 1968, much of the original cast and crew has died of AIDS. A new, star-studded production acknowledges that history.
-
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz has written a play specifically for the anniversary of the Spanish language theater.
-
An estimated 48 million Americans suffer some degree of hearing loss. Now, a smartphone app makes it possible for the theatergoers among them to read closed captions on Broadway.
-
In a letter to the New York City Ballet, Peter Martins announced he has decided to retire as its artistic director and head of its school. The announcement follows allegations from current and former dancers of sexual misconduct and physical abuse.