Almost every country/roots-rock legend has his share of detractors for knee-jerk reasons. Bob Dylan is too weird. Neil Young is too hostile. Bruce Springsteen is too rich. But Johnny Cash is pretty much untouchable. Even though (or perhaps because) you can count the chords in most of his songs on one hand, finding fault with Cash’s raw, elemental ballads and rave-ups is like finding fault with rich, fertile soil.

Finding fault with artificial turf, however, is another story. And “Ring of Fire,” the theme park-ready Johnny Cash jukebox musical that has yelped its way to Broadway, is the theatrical equivalent of AstroTurf: uniform, suspiciously shiny, and guaranteed not to stain or leave any mark on those who make the mistake of venturing onto it.

With the help of an iron-lunged sextet of singers, director-creator Richard Maltby Jr. has taken some three dozen songs written and/or made famous by the Man in Black and molded them into a peppy, pointless Cashapalooza. Mr. Maltby’s 1978 Fats Waller revue, “Ain’t Misbehavin,'” created the template for jukebox musicals, setting a lofty standard that “Ring of Fire” doesn’t even try to reach.

The irony is that Waller lived a far less colorful life than the man embodied so blandly here. Cash, an Arkansas boy whose hardscrabble childhood and saint-sinner blend fueled unforgettable tunes like “Folsom Prison Blues” and “I Walk the Line,” is enjoying a renaissance in the wake of his 2003 death. A series of pared-down, late-in-life recordings won him a new fan base, as did the biopic “Walk the Line.”

That film took its share of liberties, purging several of Cash’s kids and the deep vein of Christianity that permeated even his darkest material. But even though “Ring of Fire” remedies the latter omission, it engages in a far more damaging whitewash. Cash here is a man who speaks on behalf of the downtrodden and suffering, never as one of them. Divorce, alcoholism, drug addiction – all are swept under the carpet to make for a Grand Old Opry-style jamboree.

By the time David M. Lutken – one of the eight multitalented orchestra members who frequently augments the six lead performers – ambles forward to give an aw-shucks rendition of the harrowing “Delia’s Gone,” all is lost. The audience, which has learned by this point to settle for whatever crumbs it can get, chuckles away at a song about a man gunning down his wife.

What’s weird about this approach is that Mr. Maltby opens the show with a suitably anguished take on “Hurt,” the Trent Reznor song that Cash appropriated with such ravaged authority the year before he died. This song – and particularly its video, filmed with one unblinking take – cemented in music lovers’ minds the enduring image of Cash: that of a depleted, scoured man summoning up a series of words and notes that would singe the souls of most mortals.

But if you open a show this way, why would you shift so adamantly to the sunny side of the street? And if you do decide to make that shift, as safe and evasive as that decision is, why would you open the show with “Hurt”? Out of some vague notion that “the kids” might like it because Nine Inch Nails sang it first? Did it never cross the creators’ minds that “the kids” (and plenty of adults) responded to that song because it revealed something true about Cash’s life and his message? That the novelty numbers about egg-sucking dogs and the spunky love duets showcase only one dimension of his music – the least interesting dimension?

Mr. Maltby – who collaborated with David Shire on “Starting Here, Starting Now” and “Closer Than Ever,” two terrific musicals that conveyed complicated emotions without a script or through-line – is shrewd enough to take advantage of the superb onstage band, creating several instrumental sequences. He also fares well with the love duets, from 1959’s “I Still Miss Someone” to 1976’s “Waiting on the Far Side Banks of Jordan,” and a handful of up-tempo songs are staged vibrantly if predictably.

Of his actors, the three women fare best, despite being saddled with character types that run the gamut from “spunky and young” (Beth Malone) to “spunky and slightly less young” (gospel star Lari White) to “getting older but still spunky” (Cass Morgan, who knows how to stick a song in her back pocket and take good care of it). Jarrod Emick, who makes fine use of a three octave range, makes the strongest impression of the three men; Jeb Brown and Jason Edwards flesh out the sextet.

Even after taking into account the uninspired choreography by Lisa Shriver, the diffuse sound design, and the discordantly high-tech projections by Michael Clark (the rear wall has a high definition TV sheen), “Ring of Fire” is not as ineptly conceived as “Lennon,” the reigning champion for worst non-narrative jukebox musical. But it’s every bit as misguided. It uses the same ploy of passing around an iconic object – Lennon’s granny glasses, Cash’s black guitar – to signify a changing of the guard, although Mr. Maltby is far less consistent with this device.(Another country musical named “Honkytonk Highway” did a similar thing several years ago, much more successfully.)

“Ring of Fire” also falls into the same trap of claiming that its entire cast somehow “represents” the icon while giving extra material to the handsome young white guy who looks most like him. Like Will Chase in “Lennon,” Mr. Emick is asked to shoulder a disproportionate amount of the load. But for a musical that addresses Cash’s legacy at only the most glib, superficial level, too much still isn’t nearly enough.

Open run (243 W. 47th Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).