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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Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz has written a play specifically for the anniversary of the Spanish language theater.
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In a letter to the New York City Ballet, Peter Martins announced he has decided to retire as its artistic director and head of its school. The announcement follows allegations from current and former dancers of sexual misconduct and physical abuse.
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The famed conductor Charles Dutoit has been accused of sexual misconduct by four women including opera star Sylvia McNair. Six major orchestras have distanced themselves from him.
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The one-woman show centers on a Syrian-American who tells harrowing stories of Syria's civil war as she prepares a traditional dish. It's an intimate experience for both the audience and the actress. -
The opera, presented by Opera Philadelphia with the Apollo Theater, had its world premiere Sept. 16. It revisits the house at the center of the bombing and its impact on Philadelphia's youth today. -
Broadway casting directors are seeking to unionize like their colleagues in Hollywood, who are already represented. But Broadway producers are resisting and have even threatened to sue, despite support for the casting directors throughout the Broadway community.
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George Balanchine's modernist masterpiece was the first full-length, nonnarrative ballet. Russian, American and French ballet dancers have gathered to perform it together in New York City. -
Albee died in 2016, and in his will he asked that all his incomplete manuscripts be destroyed — including a play that was supposed to open off-Broadway. -
Delta pulled its sponsorship of New York City's Public Theater over a production of Julius Caesar that seems to depict an assassination of President Trump.
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"Great parts are meant to be played; they're not meant to be owned," says Laura Linney. So she and Cynthia Nixon have agreed to switch roles for each performance of Lillian Hellman's 1939 melodrama.
