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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Sunday's 75th annual Tony Awards celebrated Broadway's first full season since the pandemic shutdown. A theme of the night was deep gratitude for the uncelebrated people who keep the shows running.
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Seven comic actresses star in a new play by a 28-year-old up-and-coming playwright.
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James McAvoy stars in this Olivier-winning production that includes beatboxing — but no prosthetic nose.
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The big-voiced soprano is in her mid-thirties, and she didn't even hear an opera live until she was in her twenties. Now, she's a sought-after opera singer.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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While most shows are maintaining a regular schedule, nine popular musicals and plays announced they would take a hiatus until after Christmas because of breakthrough infections.
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Playwright Alice Childress took an unflinching look at racism in society and in the theater with "Trouble in Mind" in 1955. Now in its overdue Broadway premiere, the play proves prescient and timely.
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The celebrated composer-songwriter died on Friday. He had won several Tonys and Grammys, as well as an Oscar and Pulitzer, for musicals including West Side Story and Company.