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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Behind every major league ball team are a set of fast-moving men and women who make sure the game runs smoothly.
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Riders who participate in InTandem Cycling in New York find out it's more than just riding a bike and more than just exercise. It's socialization, good for your mental health and its teamwork.
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They sit behind a console that looks like the bridge of a spaceship and use complicated technology to bring words from the actors mouth to the audience's ears. -
Sherman and his brother Robert became Disney Studios' first ever in-house songwriters. They won two Oscars for their songs and score to Mary Poppins and composed the classic "It's a Small World." -
American playwright Christopher Durang has died at 75. He won a Tony Award for "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike" and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist with "Miss Witherspoon."
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The three-time Tony Award-winning Broadway legend created indelible roles: Anita in West Side Story, Rose in Bye Bye Birdie and Velma Kelly in Chicago. -
When the composer/lyricist died in 2021 at age 91, he left behind a partly finished show called Here We Are. But his collaborators say Sondheim loved a puzzle — and he left them all the pieces. -
The star of the Back to the Future: The Musical may be the car. The show's design team created a DeLorean that flies over the audience.
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Jackson was one of the finest British actors of her generation, winning Oscar, Emmy and Tony Awards. Fiercely political, she also served as a member of Parliament for decades. -
Only a handful of theater photographers work on Broadway and their challenge is to capture the essence of live performance. Ahead of the Tony Awards, we ask three about their craft.
