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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2:20pm

Mon September 12, 2011
Theater

Broadway's 'Follies,' Sounding As Sumptuous As Ever

Make no mistake: With a cast of more than 40, Follies is a really big show. The legendary musical takes place on the stage of a Broadway theater, at a reunion of former showgirls, with a domestic drama unfolding in the present while the stage is literally filled with ghosts from the past.

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2:00am

Mon August 22, 2011
Theater

Record Could Revive 'Sweet Bye And Bye'

The 1946 musical "Sweet Bye and Bye" was an unmitigated disaster and never made it to Broadway. The show closed in Philadelphia and seemed to be lost forever — until the score was rediscovered in a New Jersey warehouse in 1986.

2:57am

Tue July 12, 2011
Theater

The RSC In NYC: 41 Actors, Five Plays, Six Weeks

Right now, in New York City, one of the world's finest theater ensembles is putting on a repertory season of five Shakespeare plays. England's Royal Shakespeare Company – the RSC – has brought 41 actors, along with a replica of their main theater, and put it smack in the middle of the Park Avenue Armory.

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5:00am

Sat July 9, 2011
Music News

'The Magic Flute,' Distilled To An Essence

Credit Courtesy of Lincoln Center

Legendary British stage director Peter Brook has made a career of deconstructing and reinvestigating the classics. He rearranged the soliloquies in Shakespeare's Hamlet, and cut the chorus from Bizet's Carmen and set it in a bullring. Now, at 86, Brook is taking on one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's best-loved works, The Magic Flute.

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12:01am

Tue June 14, 2011
Theater

At Long Last, Curtain To Rise On 'Spider-Man'

After months of previews, cast injuries, scathing reviews, innumerable jokes and the firing of its creator and director, the $75 million musical Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark officially opens Tuesday night on Broadway. The show — the most expensive in Broadway history — has been almost completely revamped.

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