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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The creators of the highest-grossing animated film of all time aren't just simply letting it go — they've written a dozen new songs for a very sold-out theatrical adaptation. -
An estimated 48 million Americans suffer some degree of hearing loss. Now, a smartphone app makes it possible for the theatergoers among them to read closed captions on Broadway. -
The playwright and activist behind The Vagina Monologues stars in the new one-woman show In The Body Of The World, which explores her efforts to empower women in Africa amid her own health struggles. -
In a letter to the New York City Ballet, Peter Martins announced he has decided to retire as its artistic director and head of its school. The announcement follows allegations from current and former dancers of sexual misconduct and physical abuse.
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The new Broadway musical drama Farinelli And The King tells the tale of the bipolar King Philippe V and the famous 18th-century operatic castrato whose singing nurses him back to health. -
The famed conductor Charles Dutoit has been accused of sexual misconduct by four women including opera star Sylvia McNair. Six major orchestras have distanced themselves from him.
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Sarah DeLappe's play The Wolves, which opens in New York on Monday, follows an elite soccer team of young women as it prepares for its own battles. -
Songwriter David Yazbek knew he wanted to write a musical that fused his two cultural backgrounds and avoid the tired stories about tribal conflict. -
Irish playwright Duncan Macmillan's latest work follows an actress who goes into rehab after coming unhinged onstage. It's an unsentimental take on addiction and recovery that offers no easy answers.
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Before she was a famous author, Strayed wrote an advice column under the pseudonym "Dear Sugar." Now, it's been adapted into an unlikely off-Broadway play starring Nia Vardalos.
