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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Also known as the Polish Tea Room, the Café Edison is a favorite of regular New Yorkers and Broadway stars and crew. Now, Jeff Lunden reports it's being threatened with eviction by its landlord. -
The Leonard Bernstein Letters, edited by Nigel Simeone, compiles correspondence to and from the legendary composer and conductor. The letters — from serious to silly — offer a detailed look at both the distinguished career and the adventurous personal life of a singular American genius. -
After extended jaunts in TV and on the road, McDonald's first new album in seven years marks a return to her roots in musical theater. -
Kinky Boots, the quirky independent British film, has been turned into a splashy Broadway musical with a score by pop icon Cyndi Lauper. Reporter Jeff Lunden takes look. -
Winter Morning Walks, an album featuring jazz composer Maria Schneider and soprano Dawn Upshaw, revolves around meditations on nature and beauty by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. All three artists have had battles with cancer — when, Schneider says, "everything in life becomes heightened." -
Theatrical clowning duo Bill Irwin and David Shiner haven't shared the spotlight onstage since the late 1990s. Now, with a collaborative theater project running at off-Broadway's Signature Theatre, they bring their zany brand of participatory slapstick to a new generation. -
With hordes of tourists descending on New York for the Christmas season, Broadway is looking to turn a profit — by staging limited-run holiday musicals like A Christmas Story and Elf. But with production costs so high, how can these shows make money back? The answer, it turns out, is complicated. -
It's hard out there for Broadway understudies -- they have to learn extra lines, attend extra rehearsals and deal with the grumbling of disappointed audiences. And the pressure is even greater for those who find themselves understudying Tony-nominated actors.
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The New London Theatre's War Horse, a captivating story about war and friendship, is told with the help of life-sized horse puppets. Jeff Lunden speaks with the actors -- and the puppeteers -- behind this particular type of mechanized magic.
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In a new Broadway production of Fences, Oscar winner Denzel Washington plays Troy Maxson, a garbage collector and family man whose life's disappointment was hitting his baseball peak before blacks were allowed into the major leagues. The part was created by James Earl Jones — and the play won writer August Wilson the Pulitzer Prize.
