Pump Boys & tick, tick, Starring Lin-Manuel Miranda & Karen Olivo, to Boom at Encores!

Encores! Off-Center has announced its program for its second season of landmark off-Broadway musicals. It will feature Jonathan Larson’s tick, tick… BOOM!, headlined by Tony winners Lin-Manuel Miranda and Karen Olivo, Pump Boys and Dinnettes and the previously reported Randy Newman’s Faust.

tick, tick… BOOM! has book, music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson and will play June 25 through 28. Directed by Oliver Butler, the performances will star Tony winners Lin-Manuel Miranda (In the Heights) and Karen Olivo (West Side Story). The show is an autobiographical musical by the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award–winning composer of Rent. First performed as a solo rock monologue by Larson in 1990, it is the story of an aspiring composer who questions his life choices on the eve of his thirtieth birthday. After Larson’s untimely death, it was revamped by playwright David Auburn as a three-actor piece and premiered off-Broadway on June 13, 2001 at the Jane Street Theatre, featuring Raúl Esparza as Jon. Its London production in 2005 starred Neil Patrick Harris.

Pump Boys and Dinettes, with book, music and lyrics by John Foley, Mark Hardwick, Debra Monk, Cass Morgan, John Schimmel and Jim Wann, will play July 16 through 19. Directed by Lear deBessonet and choreographed by Danny Mefford, the show is a musical tribute to life on the roadside, with the actors accompanying themselves on guitar, piano, bass, fiddle, accordion and kitchen utensils. A hybrid of country, rock and pop music, Pump Boys is the story of four gas station attendants and two waitresses at a small-town dinette in North Carolina. It premiered off-Broadway at the Chelsea West Side Arts Theatre in July 1981 and opened on Broadway on February 4, 1982 at the Princess Theatre, where it played 573 performances and received a Tony nod for Best Musical.