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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Seven comic actresses star in a new play by a 28-year-old up-and-coming playwright. -
In 1964, the musical made a star out of 21-year-old Barbra Streisand. Now a new version features Beanie Feldstein. -
Across the country, theaters and civic organizations commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the Columbine school shootings by presenting readings of eight short plays by teenagers. -
James McAvoy stars in this Olivier-winning production that includes beatboxing — but no prosthetic nose. -
A pop-up shop in a New York subway station is home to all things Broadway: memorabilia, live performances and handmade goods created by fans. Now, the shop's owners hope to find a permanent home. -
An off-Broadway show, based on a 1931 novel, explores the results when a scientist charges Black people $50 each to change their race with his new invention. -
Tickets may be easier and cheaper to get for the plays that are still open. Some producers reopened until the virus raced through the cast and crew. Future productions are hard to see on the horizon. -
Nottage, the only woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, has a new play on Broadway, an opera at Lincoln Center Theater and a Michael Jackson musical opening soon. -
The 'Saturday Night Live' cast member and 'Schmigadoon!' star performs in "The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe," a one-woman show made famous by Lily Tomlin. -
Breakthrough infections from the omicron variant have been spreading like wildfire among casts and crews, so understudies and swing performers have been helping keep shows afloat.
