Jeff Lunden

When I was a teenager falling in love with the theater, I picked up a book called Broadway's Greatest Musicals. The sole criterion for inclusion was that a show run for at least 500 performances, which translates to about a year and a quarter.

How quaint.

I was thinking about ...

If you ask Billy Porter, one of the lead actors in the Broadway musical Kinky Boots, what the show's about, he's got a succinct answer:

"It's about two people who have daddy issues," Porter says. "And one of them just happens to wear a dress."

Porter would be that guy: ...

Several years ago, when Nora Ephron handed Tom Hanks an early draft of Lucky Guy, her play about tabloid journalist Mike McAlary, he had a pretty strong reaction.

"I said, 'Well, that guy's sure a jerk!' I used another word besides jerk — I know what you can say on ...

Minnesota-born composer Maria Schneider has called New York home for more than 30 years, and she knows how to find nature in the middle of the city. Because her new album is called Winter Morning Walks, we walked to her favorite bird-watching spot in Central Park on a ...

Twenty years ago, theatrical clowns Bill Irwin and David Shiner collaborated on a Broadway show called Fool Moon — a giddy mixture of slapstick, improv and audience participation that proved such a success that it came back to Broadway for two more runs and toured both the U.S. and Europe. ...

This weekend, a new adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein television classic Cinderella opens on Broadway. It stars Laura Osnes, the ingenue of the moment. But Osnes' career path has had an unusual trajectory.

Six years ago, the then-21-year-old was newly wed and fresh out of Minnesota. She landed on ...

A Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' iconic Cat on a Hot Tin Roof may feature big names, but it aims for a quiet kind of authenticity. Director Rob Ashford asked his cast to take...

The Academy Award-winning actress was a star on both stage and screen, best known for roles in Gentleman's Agreement, All About Eve and Oklahoma!

This summer marks the half-century anniversary of Central Park's Delacorte Theater, home of the free annual Shakespeare in the Park. Jeff Lunden looks at the theater's beginnings and ...

One of New York's most loved cabaret spaces will not return after renovations. Singer Andrea Marcovicci was kind of a lifer at the Oak Room. For 25 years she performed there, surround...

A British comedy that was the fastest selling ticket in the history of London's West End opens on Broadway tonight with its original cast. As Jeff Lunden reports, One Man, Two Guvnors...

The Australian actress known in the U.S. for her role on HBO's Six Feet Under returns to her roots as a stage actress in Other Desert Cities. "Theater was where I began," she says.

Once, the much-loved 2007 Irish indie, was kind of the little movie musical that could. Made on a shoestring budget in Dublin, it starred songwriters Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova as thinly veiled versions of themselves, and it was as much about the love of making music as it ...

Critics have said that Osvaldo Golijov may be the first significant classical music composer to define the sound of the 21st century. It's part of the reason why he was named a MacArthur fellow in 2003. Jeff Lunden spoke with Golijov about his love ...

Can a computer compose Baroque music as well as Bach? Some programmers and musicologists are trying to find out. Jeff Lunden explains why.

Composer Rinde Eckert's opera And God Created Great Whales is a meditation on creativity, memory, madness, and Moby-Dick. Produced by Jeff Lunden.

When surrounded by harmonious caroling during the holiday season, do you ever secretly wonder whether you're tone deaf? You can take heart, because true tone deafness, otherwise known as congenital amusia, is actually quite rare. Jeff Lunden talked with scientists trying to unlock the mystery of this discordant condition.

Back in the fall of 1892, the prominent Czech composer Antonin Dvorak sailed to New York and wound up staying for three and a half years. While he was here he created several masterworks, including his best known, the New World Symphony. Jeff Lunden explains that with that piece, ...

In the 1930s and '40s, Hollywood became a major destination for European composers fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe, and they made Tinseltown an important musical center, not just for film scores, but for contemporary classical music. Produced by Jeff Lunden.

How some singers can pull a perfect "A" out of thin air — and how it can sometimes drive them crazy. An exploration of one of the most mysterious natural musical abilities, the phenomenon known as perfect pitch. Produced by Jeff Lunden.