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 whirlwind finish for the Broadway season saw 19 shows open in March and April. Are producers skewing the process in hopes voters will pick fresher shows over faded memories from the fall? Jeff Lunden looks back at a so-so year on the Great White Way.
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Clothes Make The Man (And The Woman, And The Show) On BroadwayAmong the hopefuls who might take home trophies at this weekend's Tony Awards are costume designers William Ivey Long and Dominique Lemieux. Jeff Lunden talks to the two about their work on Cinderella and Pippin, two of the season's better-upholstered revivals. -
Several productions in New York's smaller theaters aren't content with providing passive experiences — the audience is asked to participate. Here Lies Love, a new David Byrne musical about Imelda Marcos at the Public Theater, is set in a disco and the audience moves around, from scene to scene, dancing all the while. Natasha, Pierre and the Comet of 1812, is an electronic pop opera based on a portion of Tolstoy's War and Peace, and is set in a Russian restaurant where audiences are served a meal and vodka as part of the performance. And the audience explores a run-down hotel in Sleep No More, a dance/theater experience based loosely on Macbeth, following actors up and down floors and into different rooms.
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The union of actors and stage managers, who banded together to improve working conditions in the early 1900s, marks its centennial this year. As Jeff Lunden reports, it's operating in an ever-shifting theatrical landscape. -
After extended jaunts in TV and on the road, McDonald's first new album in seven years marks a return to her roots in musical theater. -
The smash-hit '70s musical, which made a name for Wicked composer Stephen Schwartz, gets a shiny new production set at the circus — with real-life acrobats and Broadway pros alike in the center ring. -
The plays of William Shakespeare are known for their enduring universality, so the Royal Shakespeare Company's new production of Julius Caesar -- set in a chaotic African dictatorship, with an all-black cast — makes a certain sense. -
Roald Dahl's beloved children's novel is set to hit the stage as a Broadway musical. The musical's creators say the show skews closer to the beloved book than to Danny DeVito's 1996 movie, leaning more on the original's naughty charm.
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These days, a hit show can run not just for years but for decades. So how do you keep it fresh for new audiences? Reporter Jeff Lunden talks to people who work on three of Broadway's biggest hits to find out. -
Lucky Guyis one of the spring theater season's most highly anticipated plays. It stars Hanks, in his first Broadway performance, as tabloid journalist Mike McAlary. Director George Wolfe calls Ephron's last play "a love poem to journalism."
