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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A new museum celebrating the history of Broadway is now in New York's theater district.
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A new Broadway musical follows how global K-Pop superstars put everything on the line when one singer tries to dismantle one of the largest record labels in the industry.
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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.
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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.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Charles Fuller died on Monday in Toronto. He was 83. Fuller was best known for A Soldier's Play – which was turned into an Oscar nominated film, A Soldier's Story.
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All four of the playwright's grandparents died in the Holocaust, but Stoppard only learned he was Jewish in middle age. Now, at 85, he engages with his family history in the play Leopoldstadt.
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In 2014, a study found that only 1.4% of orchestra musicians were Black. In 2022, it's hard to know if that number is better or worse.
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It's been a year since Broadway started back up again - and there've been a lot of ups and downs. COVID still had the power to shut down shows, but performers and audiences persisted.