The Theatre Department will present the world premiere of Car Talk: The Musical!!! from March 31-April 3, 2011 at the Modern Theatre.

The new musical – inspired by the hit National Public Radio show of the same name and written and directed by Suffolk University Professor Wesley Savick – will be the first production created for the new Modern Theatre.

Ray and Tom Magliozzi, co-hosts of NPR’s “Car Talk,” generously granted permission for Suffolk University to soup up their show with a musical engine. The brothers, AKA Click and Clack, first appeared on the Boston airwaves in 1977. Their radio call-in show, which offers automotive know-how with an air of hilarity, was picked up by NPR for a nationwide audience in 1987.

The play sends up classic Broadway songs about love and relationships, turning the romantic to the automotive and showing how the psychological and the mechanical intertwine, much in the way that the Car Boys do week after week on their NPR radio show.

Car Talk: The Musical!!! is a comedy that Savick describes as “an unlikely marriage between Broadway musicals and automotive advice.” Characters include Rusty Fenders, a hapless middle aged owner of a terminally ill ’93 KIA; who falls in love with Miata C. LaChassis. She steers him to the Emerald Garage, where the characters receive guidance in navigating through life, love, car repair and everything in between.

The Theatre Department has been developing new musicals since 1987 through its Boston Music Theatre Project.This World Premiere production will feature 22 Suffolk University students and an alumnus from the class of 2005, Nael Nacer, who most recently was seen on stage in Boston as part of Company One’s production of Annie Baker’s The Aliens.

The scenic designer on the production is Richard W. Chambers. Car Talk: The Musical!!! will feature five original songs composed by Michael Wartofsky as well as a dozen pre-owned Broadway standards.