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.
-
Every year, NPR's Jeff Lunden talks to some of the hardworking people in the theater biz who aren't eligible for Tony nominations. -
Best remembered as a 1943 film starring Ethel Waters, the musical is being resurrected as a concert series, which aims to both honor the story and reckon with its racist roots. -
For one 14-year-old fan, BroadwayCon was a chance to meet people who understand her theater obsession. "We can share what we love," she says. -
Organizers of Under the Radar regularly search the globe for cutting-edge theater that is urgent and relevant. This year's festival features works from Rwanda, the U.S. and Japan. -
As part of NPR's year-end series "One That Got Away", reporter Jeff Lunden tells us about his favorite song from the hit Broadway musical Hamilton. It's not about the founding fathers; it's about some founding mothers.
-
Kurt Masur, the German conductor whose career spanned leading an orchestra in East Germany to more than a decade of reshaping the New York Philharmonic, has died at 88.
-
Based on co-writer Griffin Matthews' experiences in the country, Invisible Thread explores the connection between an American gay couple and a group of Ugandan orphans. -
The Masters of Sex actress is no stranger to Broadway; in fact, she's already won a Tony. Now she's in her first starring role, in Sylvia — and prepping by watching her pet, because she plays a dog. -
Whorl Inside A Loop, a new play opening in New York, looks at six inmates in a medium security prison and the actress who agrees to teach them how to tell their stories — as she steals those stories for her own use. The play really did get its start behind bars.
-
The new musical about the U.S.'s Founding Fathers — set to a mostly hip-hop score — that everyone's been talking about for months and months finally opens officially on Broadway Thursday night.
