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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The musical is an adaptation of a Peabody award-winning HBO documentary — it follows seven young people at a group counseling center in Columbus as they get ready for a big dance. -
Long before The Backstreet Boys, a vocal sextet in Weimar Germany was silenced because three memebrs were Jewish. A new Broadway musical with a score by Barry Manilow tells their story. -
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.
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In 1961, actor and Civil Rights activist Ossie Davis wrote the blistering play Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch. Now, Leslie Odom Jr. stars in the revival. -
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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It flies over the audience and flips over — but that's not all that it does. -
Is "Here Lies Love" the future of Broadway? The immersive musical about Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos is a $22 million gamble. (Story first aired on Morning Edition on Julu 18, 2023.)
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Here Lies Love tells the story of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos' rise and fall in the Philippines. The $22 million immersive musical production is a big Broadway gamble. -
The Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning lyricist was one of the last masters of Broadway's Golden Age. His career extended over 60 years. -
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.
