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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A few years ago, a children's book called A is for Audra celebrated musical theater divas. Its creators have written a new book, B is for Broadway, celebrating theater from auditions to Ziegfeld. -
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. -
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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During the height of pandemic closures, three artistic directors spoke about their hopes for what theater would look like when it reopened. More than a year later, we check in to see what's changed. -
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. -
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater shifted to streaming presentations online during pandemic. Now, two dances conceived for the web are included in the company's return to in-person performance. -
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. -
Composer, conductor and MacArthur "genius" Mathew Aucoin just debuted his opera, 'Eurydice,' at the Met. The new work reinterprets an ancient, archetypal myth from the perspective of its namesake. -
After more than a year of closures and reflection, Broadway is back making changes to who is represented on stage.
