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.
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George Balanchine's modernist masterpiece was the first full-length, nonnarrative ballet. Russian, American and French ballet dancers have gathered to perform it together in New York City. -
The 6-year-old children's book character struck a chord when she debuted in the 1950s. Now a new exhibition shines a light on how Eloise came to be. -
NewsAlbee died in 2016, and in his will he asked that all his incomplete manuscripts be destroyed — including a play that was supposed to open off-Broadway. -
Delta pulled its sponsorship of New York City's Public Theater over a production of Julius Caesar that seems to depict an assassination of President Trump.
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Off in the wings, stage managers coordinate cast and crew, calling hundreds of cues during Broadway performances. They may not win Tony Awards, but without them, not even the curtain would go up. -
A small theater in Portland, Ore., cast an African-American actor in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But the Albee estate wouldn't grant the rights to produce the 1962 play. -
"Great parts are meant to be played; they're not meant to be owned," says Laura Linney. So she and Cynthia Nixon have agreed to switch roles for each performance of Lillian Hellman's 1939 melodrama. -
Composer Tim Minchin brings his musical adaptation of the film, Groundhog Day, to Broadway. It's the story of a cynical weatherman who is forced to relive the same day over and over again.
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With 18 new shows — half of them musicals — opening this March and April, just before Tony nominations are announced, producers have to take risks to get their shows to stand out. -
The class-action suit brought against the hit musical doesn't seek damages. The attorneys say the hope is to draw attention to Broadway's spotty record in serving audiences with disabilities.
