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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Sanaz Toossi is having a moment – her first production ever, English, just won a Lucille Lortel award for outstanding new off-Broadway play, and Wish You Were Here opened last week. -
These nominations are for Broadway's first season after the 2020 COVID shutdown.
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A new virtual art exhibition celebrates theater, movies and television with original sketches by Broadway set and costume designers.
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Seven comic actresses star in a new play by a 28-year-old up-and-coming playwright.
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Across the country, theaters and civic organizations commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the Columbine school shootings by presenting readings of eight short plays by teenagers.
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James McAvoy stars in this Olivier-winning production that includes beatboxing — but no prosthetic nose.
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Tickets may be easier and cheaper to get for the plays that are still open. Some producers reopened until the virus raced through the cast and crew. Future productions are hard to see on the horizon.
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Breakthrough infections from the omicron variant have been spreading like wildfire among casts and crews, so understudies and swing performers have been helping keep shows afloat.
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The celebrated composer-songwriter died on Friday. He had won several Tonys and Grammys, as well as an Oscar and Pulitzer, for musicals including West Side Story and Company.
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Broadway shows have implemented strict protocols, but anxiety is high. "The culture of 'the show must go on,' it has to be left behind," says the executive director of the Actors' Equity Association.
