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 PROTOTYPE festival, now in its 10th year, presents new operas and music-theater works in smaller settings. "We were trying to create a black box opera movement," says co-founder Beth Morrison. -
You never know what'll hit or miss — but you can look at who wrote the script and score, and who's directing and starring. Here's what Jeff Lunden is keeping his eye on, both on and off-Broadway. -
Kelli O'Hara, Renée Fleming, and Joyce DiDonato star in a new opera based on Michael Cunningham's book. -
The Museum of Broadway in New York has lots of history and is also an interactive attraction where you can step inside a set or learn what it takes to make a show.
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A new museum celebrating the history of Broadway is now in New York's theater district. -
The South Korean cultural phenomenon is now a new musical, starring actual K-pop idols. -
This production uses a cast of multi-racial actors who are female, nonbinary and trans — people who weren't even considered in the Declaration of Independence. -
Kalfin co-founded the Chelsea Theater Center, which was known for provocative off-Broadway shows.
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Lansbury's acting career extended over an extraordinary seven decades. She says she knew early on that she'd never be "groomed to be a glamorous movie star" and thus sought out nontraditional roles.
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The new David Geffen Hall in Lincoln Center, home of the New York Philharmonic, opens this week. And while the outside is the same, everything inside has changed.
