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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Only a handful of theater photographers work on Broadway and their challenge is to capture the essence of live performance. Ahead of the Tony Awards, we ask three about their craft. -
Classical 101Producers have been saying for years that large Broadway orchestras are not financially feasible. In fact, the issue led to a strike 20 years ago. So why are some shows bringing them back? -
"We don't gender other people's professions," says actor Alex Newell. "You say ... I'm going to my dentist and I need to hire a plumber." But Broadway's highest honors have male/female distinctions. -
On Sunday night the curtain will fall on the longest-running show in Broadway history: Andrew Lloyd Webber's mega hit ran for more than 35 years. "I got the gig of a lifetime," says one cast member. -
Josh Groban, Michael Cerveris, Norm Lewis and Len Cariou all agree: It's exhausting playing a murderous sociopath, while dealing with stage blood, a mechanical barber chair and singing complex music. -
Super fan Bruce Reznick, 86, has been a fixture at Nets games since before the team moved to Brooklyn. -
The PROTOTYPE festival, now in its 10th year, presents new operas and music-theater works in smaller settings. "We were trying to create a black box opera movement," says co-founder Beth Morrison. -
Kelli O'Hara, Renée Fleming, and Joyce DiDonato star in a new opera based on Michael Cunningham's book. -
A new museum celebrating the history of Broadway is now in New York's theater district. -
The South Korean cultural phenomenon is now a new musical, starring actual K-pop idols.
