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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In New York City, the venerable Hudson Theater reopens this week, after nearly a half-century of being used for other purposes. It's the newest addition to Broadway's 40 stages.
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The Rockettes are as American as apple pie, but some dancers in the famous troupe don't want to perform at Donald Trump's inauguration.
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Beth Morrison is not your typical moneyed arts patron — but over the past decade, she's managed to gather the funding and venue support to produce works by some of today's most innovative composers. -
Saariaho isn't the first woman composer to stage an opera at New York's Metropolitan Opera — just the first in more than a century. Her opera, L'Amour de Loin, has its New York premiere this week. -
Librettist Gene Scheer says the drama of George Bailey's life is "an operatic story." So he, along with composer Jake Heggie, turned It's a Wonderful Life into an opera. -
When Falsettos first premiered in 1981, this frank, funny musical about gay, Jewish life in New York City was covering new territory. Now a revival is in the works, but will it still feel resonant in an age where gay rights have become mainstream?
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In 1969, an explorer and photographer named Loren McIntyre was dropped into the Amazon rainforest to try and make contact with a tribe called the Mayoruna. Now his story is headed to Broadway. The show uses binaural audio to play sounds of the rainforest in 3-D.
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Neville Marriner died overnight at age 92. The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields conductor was famous for his score to the Academy Award-winning film Amadeus.
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News"All art should be useful," Albee said. "If it's merely decorative, it's a waste of time." The Pulitzer-winning playwright of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? died Friday following a short illness. -
You might not know Marni Nixon's name, but you've probably heard her. Nixon dubbed the voices for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Deborah Kerr in The King and I.
