GAS STATION SETTING FOR ‘PUMP BOYS’

Who’d have ever thought that a low-key, country-style musical set in a gas station-diner would become an international hit?

It happened in 1982 with “Pump Boys and Dinettes” (opening Wednesday at the Las Palmas Theatre), which premiered Off Off Broadway, went on to Off Broadway and Broadway and currently is seeing a burgeoning number of regional and touring productions.

Yet, the show’s beginnings were hardly auspicious.

“We did a summer’s worth of late-night engagements at (New York’s) Westside Arts Theatre,” recalled co-creator/performer Jim Wann, who (along with fellow original member John Foley) has rejoined the cast here. “The show before us had a fancy New Orleans set. We’d come in at 11 and trash it, put up ‘Eat’ and ‘Gas’ signs. The gas station was a piano, the diner was a couple of stools. Opening night, there were six people in the audience: a press agent, Derek Jacobi and four winos. The agent and Derek Jacobi left at intermission. It was fairly depressing.”

A glowing review in the N.Y. Post changed that, and soon “there were limos, Liza Minnelli. We were an underground sensation.”

The show’s appeal?

“Well, it’s not the stuff of a Broadway musical. There are six musicians onstage, as opposed to a pit band and actors onstage. The musicians are telling the story. These are people who work at ordinary jobs, but their dreams are big--and that comes out in the songs. There’s a definite feeling of these people supporting, being there, for each other. And the vision of small-town rural America is almost a vanished way of life.”

Actually, it was in a similar setting that the Tennessee-born Wann, 38, planted the seeds that would later become “Pump Boys.”

“When I was living in North Carolina during the ‘70s, I used to hang around a gas station called Merrit’s Esso, and me and my music-playing buddies would drink beer there and work on our cars. We were the young aspirants to the hanging-around-the-gas-station style, which many of the old-timers had perfected. So, we worked on our songs and our cars. And I kind of brought that (experience) with me to New York, never dreaming I’d do anything with it.”

It was some time later, while playing guitar in a musical duo at a local restaurant bar, that partner Mark Harwick showed up in a gas jockey-type uniform, “and that inspired me to write a few songs about life at a gas station.”

At the same time, Wann’s wife, Cass Morgan, was putting together an act about two sisters who ran a diner. The newly christened Pump Boys needed livening up, the Dinettes needed a band. (Noted Wann: “People liked the Pump Boys, but they liked the Pump Boys and Dinettes a whole lot more.”)

“There is a story line, but it’s slender,” he warned. “The women already had characters: They called themselves Prudie and Rhetta Cupp and ran the Double Cupp Diner. At that time, the Pump Boys didn’t have characters--we were just ourselves. So I had to invent little personal histories.”

The musical chores fell mostly to Wann (he wrote 13 of the 20 songs and co-wrote five more), although he stresses the element of collaboration: “The Dinettes wrote a couple of songs, Mark and Debbie (Monk) wrote one, Cass and I wrote one. But the staging was a group effort. (All six original members are billed as co-writers.)

“Fundamentally, we’re a band,” he reminded. “So the whole evening is mostly singing and playing, and the story line is carried by the songs”--a mix of gospel, rockabilly, blues, ballads and country. Instrumentally, the Pump Boys are divided among a piano, bass and two guitars, while the women play percussion, “but except for the occasional tambourine, it’s all done on pots and pans, kitchen utensils that come out of the diner.”

Wann (who recently supervised a Cleveland staging of his “Diamond Studs,” a similarly-styled musical piece based on Jesse James), is clearly enjoying the return visit to the material.

Along with original member Foley, “the Dinettes and the piano player are from the Chicago production, the bass player’s done it several places around the country--so everyone’s a veteran. There’s a constant connection of former members and new members working on the show: directing, musical directing, advising. Which means it keeps getting better.”