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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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."
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The improv and comedy organization that famously shuns New York City has just opened in Brooklyn — with a 200-seat mainstage, a 60-seat second stage, classrooms and a restaurant. -
The three-time Tony Award-winning Broadway legend created indelible roles: Anita in West Side Story, Rose in Bye Bye Birdie and Velma Kelly in Chicago. -
The classic 1962 movie tells the story of a relationship buckling under the weight of addiction. The new Broadway adaptation stars Kelli O'Hara and Brian d'Arcy James. -
The musical is an adaptation of a Peabody award-winning HBO documentary — it follows seven young people at a group counseling center in Columbus as they get ready for a big dance. -
Long before The Backstreet Boys, a vocal sextet in Weimar Germany was silenced because three memebrs were Jewish. A new Broadway musical with a score by Barry Manilow tells their story. -
When the composer/lyricist died in 2021 at age 91, he left behind a partly finished show called Here We Are. But his collaborators say Sondheim loved a puzzle — and he left them all the pieces.
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In 1961, actor and Civil Rights activist Ossie Davis wrote the blistering play Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch. Now, Leslie Odom Jr. stars in the revival. -
The star of the Back to the Future: The Musical may be the car. The show's design team created a DeLorean that flies over the audience.
