Thomas Keneally's Transport to Have World Premiere at Irish Repertory Theater in 2014

The world premiere of Transport, a new musical with a book and lyrics by Thomas Keneally (Schindler’s List) and music by Larry Kirwan, is set for a limited engagement at the Irish Repertory Theater beginning February 16, 2014. According to the New York Times the new production will be directed and designed by Tony and Oscar winner Tony Walton and the show will run through April 6. Futher casting and creatives will be announced in due course.

Transport tells the journey of Irish women exiled to Australia in the mid-19th century and focuses on a prison liner called "The Whisper," which carried females to penal colonies. The characters include four prisoners, the crew of the ship and a banished Irish priest.

A native Australian, Keneally is best known for his Booker Prize-winning novel Schindler’s Ark which he later adapted to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1993. In his nonfiction book, The Great Shame, the author wrote of how his Irish forebears were deported for minor crimes in the Irish famine and its aftermath.

Walton's design credits on Broadway include A Tale of Two Cities, Uncle Vanya, Annie Get Your Gun, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Six Degrees of Separation and Anything Goes. He won Tony awards for The Apple Tree, the original production of Pippin, House of Blue Leaves and Guys and Dolls, and garnered an Oscar for Bob Fosse’s All That Chat. Other film and TV design credits include The Wiz, Murder on the Orient Express, Mary Poppins and The Boy Friend.