Randal Myler has something of a cottage industry going, developing shows based on music and musicians not often encountered in the theater. He directed and helped write the revue ''It Ain't Nothin' but the Blues,'' and he created ''Love, Janis'' from the life, letters and rock 'n' roll of Janis Joplin. Both shows are compact, stageable in relatively small spaces, and both have proved durable, earning enthusiastic reviews and solid audiences in several cities.

Mr. Myler's third show of this ilk, ''Hank Williams: Lost Highway,'' based on the life of the country music legend, has now arrived in New York, after stops around the country that include Denver, Los Angeles, Nashville and Cleveland. The show opened on Thursday night at the Manhattan Ensemble Theater in SoHo, just in time for the 50th anniversary of Williams's death on New Year's Day 1953.
Like Mr. Myler's previous musical roundups, without finally being great theater, it is great fun; in fact, it's the best and the smartest of the three, not least because it honors a very particular musical genre and musical talent with care and energy.
Williams was a pioneer of the celebrity life arc that, from James Dean to Jimi Hendrix to Kurt Cobain, has come to seem quintessentially American: the genius of pop culture who rockets to early fame and flames out tragically.

A poor boy from Montgomery, Ala., who fused the blues with a yodel and a backwoods twang to create the keen, silky sound of heartbreak, Williams became a star of the Grand Ole Opry.

He reached millions of listeners in the late 1940's and early 50's with songs like ''Your Cheatin' Heart,'' ''I Can't Help It (if I'm Still in Love With You)'' and ''Lovesick Blues'' and then drank himself spectacularly into the grave at 29.

The narrative has its sweet and pungent moments; for instance, a speech by a truck stop waitress makes it especially evident who Williams' listeners were and why they loved him so. And the script offers up a healthy dose of amusements in the form of backcountry word-slinging: ''She could melt the wax off a Dixie cup at 50 feet,'' is how Hank's wife, Audrey, is described at one point. Williams had a feral intensity of an alcoholic's devotion to the bottle and the impatience of a young genius with the musical shortcomings of others -- his wife, for instance. Moreover, the actor who plays Hank is asked to turn up the charisma factor in his own performance whenever, as Hank, he takes up his guitar and faces an audience from behind a microphone; it's a fine representation of how an artist feeds on his art and on the spotlight. In an especially brave moment of staging that brazenly reaches for both emotional and musical resonance, the Mr. Myler has the lead actor render the signature Williams anthem, ''I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry,'' as a slow, bare-bones solo, making the moment artfully grave and showing off the song for what it is: a masterpiece of desperate heartsickness.

The musicians include a tub-thumping upright bass player; lead guitar; a great fiddler and mandolinist; and an actor on pedal steel guitar. These are the Drifting Cowboys, Williams' longtime band, and they're wonderfully lively, skillful and well rehearsed.
Also part of the cast is the music publisher who discovered Hank and became his adviser and agent; Hank's tough old broad of a mom; and an older African America actor who, to open each act, belts out a powerful a cappella cotton field chant. His character, called Tee-Tot, is a black street singer who taught the young Hank about the blues: ''You wanna sing about hard times,'' he tells Hank, ''find some o' your own.''
Even though Tee-Tot doesn't figure much in the play, he spends the entirety of it on the stage, sitting on one side listening to the radio in a gas station (and occasionally accompanying the music, blowing across the opening of a whiskey jug). Across from him is the waitress, who spends much of the play polishing glasses at a small lunch counter, her head inclined sadly toward a radio of her own. The two make the implicit connection between how Hank learned his stuff and how he gave back what he learned, between the black musical tradition and the white redneck world, between Hank's musical roots and his legacy.

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