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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Gypsy has been called the best musical of all time. Audra McDonald is starring in a new Broadway revival, and the race-conscious casting gives the production a new frame. -
Lionel trains turns 125, celebrating more than a century of holiday magic. From historic models to smartphone-controlled locomotives, these iconic toy trains continue to captivate kids and collectors alike. -
Stereophonic, which had 13 nominations, won five awards, including best play. The Outsiders and Merrily We Roll Along picked up four awards each. Hell's Kitchen, nominated for 13 awards, won two.
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They sit behind a console that looks like the bridge of a spaceship and use complicated technology to bring words from the actors mouth to the audience's ears. -
Dig into the nominees and learn about the likely winners.
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Sherman and his brother Robert became Disney Studios' first ever in-house songwriters. They won two Oscars for their songs and score to Mary Poppins and composed the classic "It's a Small World." -
Playwright Paula Vogel is known not just for her work on Broadway — but for the generations of famous playwrights whose careers she has nurtured. Mother Play is about her own mother. -
Stereophonic, a new play on Broadway with music by Arcade Fire's Will Butler, tracks the volatile creation of a rock and roll album over the course of a year in the 1970s. -
Once the toast of 1920s Paris, Tamara de Lempicka's story is now on Broadway. She was a modernist art deco artist who's better known in Europe than in the U.S. -
American playwright Christopher Durang has died at 75. He won a Tony Award for "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike" and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist with "Miss Witherspoon."
