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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Sunday night's Tony Awards will honor actors and actresses, but not those who create their elaborate coiffures. That's because the best in the business know how to stay out of the spotlight. -
The soundtrack to Disney's Frozen has been the biggest-selling album of 2014, topping the Billboard album chart for 13 weeks. -
ASCAP — the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers — was founded on Feb. 13, 1914, to protect its members' copyrights by monitoring public performances of their music. It hasn't been an easy century; in fact, just about every victory has come as the result of litigation. -
The legendary Harlem nightclub and the artists and music it's synonymous with are being celebrated in a new Broadway revue. Jeff Lunden talks to cast members and the creators about the pleasures and perils of paying homage to a place with a problematic history. -
By most estimates, the trouble-plagued show will have lost about $60 million when it closes tomorrow. It has been commercial theater's most stunning flop. -
When billionaire John Paulson first bought Steinway & Sons, it struck fear in the hearts of musicians. Would Steinway's famously handcrafted pianos be changed, for the sake of efficiency? -
After a round of emergency fundraising failed, New York's "People's Opera" is shutting down. Unfortunately, many — including the company's current director and its musicians — saw this coming. -
A revival of Tennessee Williams' glorious 1945 drama opens tonight at Broadway's Booth Theater. Zachary Quinto and Cherry Jones star in the play, which is partly based on the playwright's own life and family. -
If all goes according to plan, sometime next year the Federal Communications Commission will auction off a chunk of the airwaves to wireless carriers. It promises to provide greatly improved service for smartphones and other wireless devices, as well as raise billions of dollars for the federal government. The auction could also create serious problems for businesses which depend on wireless microphones and intercoms, like professional football, mega-churches and Broadway.
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For the first time since the Tony Award-winning adaptation of Two Gentlemen of Verona in 1972, New York's Public Theater is presenting a brand-new musical as part of the Shakespeare in the Park series. The team behind the hit Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson have adapted Love's Labour's Lost.
