JOHNNY, GET YOUR GUN

So far as I know, the collected oeuvres of many country music stars haven't fallen into the pipeline to become Broadway's next "jukebox musical." Yes, Dolly Parton is writing the score to a musical version of 9 to 5, and yes, Hank Williams: Lost Highway, which ran Off-Broadway, is one of the most frequently produced revues in regional theaters.

But no musicals are based on the music and lives of Willie Nelson, Mel Tillis, Barbara Mandrell, Waylon Jennings, Tanya Tucker, Loretta Lynn, Kenny Rodgers, Tammy Wynette, George Jones, Dottie West and Minnie Pearl. Not yet, pahdnuh.

Still, unlike others, the incomparable music and extraordinary life of Johnny Cash is a perfect fit for storytelling: his family's Depression-era poverty; his brother's early death; his recurrent, painful addictions; his career's majestic peaks and agonizing troughs; his astonishing and triumphant final years. With Walk the Line, mainstream Hollywood figured this out-certainly that newly-minted Oscar-winner, Reese Witherspoon, is grateful for it. So why must Ring of Fire, the Richard Maltby Jr.-directed musical at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, be so unrelentingly nice?

We do expect more of Maltby. Not only did he create Ain't Misbehavin', a richly conceived revue of the songs of Fats Waller that captured the 1978 Tony for Best Musical, but Maltby himself nabbed a directing Tony for the original Broadway production. Also a fine lyricist, Maltby's celebrated collaboration with composer David Shire has resulted in two revues-Closer Than Ever and Starting Here, Starting Now-that remain cherished in many theatergoers' memories and hold up as marvelous examples of the revue genre.

Not that Ring of Fire entirely lacks concept or perspective. Six performers on stage, three men and three women, symbolize Cash and his raven-haired wife, June Carter Cash-the scion of a famously talented country music family-during youth, middle-age and late in life. Certain songs-like the title song-which helps to usher an end to Act I, offer a sense of visual harmony to complement the musical harmony that, in these performers' hands, is never less than unimpressive.

Yet as superbly well-voiced as these six performers (Jeb Brown, Jason Edwards, Jarrod Emick, Beth Malone, Cass Morgan, Lari White) are, in the overall there's something inescapably ecru about Ring of Fire-something too Branson, Mo., something too scrubbed, something too sanitized; something too unconnected to Cash's never-airbrushed legend.

This is a show you could see anywhere-Branson, Vegas-and while it leaves you entertained, it also leaves you engagement-free, exploration-free and thought-free. If the unwholesome story of the Four Seasons could be told, warts and all, in Jersey Boys, using the group's music as a springboard for dramaturgy, surely Cash's story requires more than toothy grins for upbeat songs, pensive looks for downbeat songs, derivative choreography (by Lisa Shriver), and, in another example of Broadway's worst habit, needless over-amplification.

Perhaps Ring of Fire is not really about Johnny Cash. As such songs as "My Old Faded Rose," "I Still Miss Someone," "A Boy Named Sue," "Going to Memphis," "Folsom Prison Blues," "Man in Black," "I Walk the Line" and "Waiting on the Far Side Banks of Jordan" inevitably waft across the footlights, flooding our ears with well-etched aural memories of the man in black's distinctive vocal rumble, perhaps what Maltby, aided by the sharp onstage band, is aiming for is not so much a celebration of Cash as of cash-the willingness of domestic tourists to spend Broadway-level bucks to hear the music of their heartland youth. If so, Ring of Fire is damnably cynical. If not, Ring of Fire is merely damnable-a song-stuffed museum and a sad, sad shame.