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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On Sunday night the curtain will fall on the longest-running show in Broadway history: Andrew Lloyd Webber's mega hit ran for more than 35 years. "I got the gig of a lifetime," says one cast member.
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On Sunday night the curtain will fall on the longest-running show in Broadway history: Andrew Lloyd Webber's mega hit ran for more than 35 years. "I got the gig of a lifetime," says one cast member.
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Josh Groban, Michael Cerveris, Norm Lewis and Len Cariou all agree: It's exhausting playing a murderous sociopath, while dealing with stage blood, a mechanical barber chair and singing complex music.
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Topol — the actor who went by a single name and who appeared on stage as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof hundreds of times — has died.
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Hansberry is best known for A Raisin in the Sun — but as she lay dying, she wrote this play about the haplessness of white liberals. Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan star.
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For every sports team, there are fans and there are super fans. For the Brooklyn Nets, that's 86-year-old Mr. Whammy — who tries to hex the opposing basketball team into missing their foul shots.
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Super fan Bruce Reznick, 86, has been a fixture at Nets games since before the team moved to Brooklyn.
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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.
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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.
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Kelli O'Hara, Renée Fleming, and Joyce DiDonato star in a new opera based on Michael Cunningham's book.