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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You might not know Marni Nixon's name, but you've probably heardher. Nixon dubbed the voices for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Deborah Kerr in The King and I.
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The Fun Home won best musical, best book and best original score — to name just a few of the honors. The award for best play went to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.
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The resplendent New York piano showroom is shutting down to make way for luxury condos. But that doesn't mean the company is going anywhere.
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The oratorio is a time-honored way for classical composers to tell a big story. Composer Ted Hearne thinks so too. His new oratorio, The Source, takes on the story of Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks.
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Legendary theater director Peter Brook is working on a new play centered on people with unusual conditions — like synesthesia, extraordinary memory or the inability to sense their own bodies.
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While agreements with 10 more unions need to be reached by Tuesday night, the deal struck with two of the Met's major unions represents a major turning point in a bitter dispute.
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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.
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The soundtrack to Disney's Frozen has been the biggest-selling album of 2014, topping the Billboard album chart for 13 weeks.
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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.
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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?