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Sneaky Ole Time: The Music of Paul Overstreet

Reviewed by Myron Meisel

Ruskin Group Theatre

Through September 19

I listen to a lot of country music (Charlie Louvin on the turntable at the moment), though for the most part I cannot abide what plays under that pretense on the radio. Most of that seems irretrievably suburban, though one imagines that’s what become of most of the actual countryside over the past half century. Most of this popular chart fodder sounds inauthentic and reactionary to these ears, particularly in the decades since the post-Urban Cowboy resurgence into mainstream, and definitely not too keen on them hat acts.

Paul Overstreet has had his songs covered by the full gamut of major players, breaking his first hit through George Jones (“Same Ole Me”) and including Randy Travis, Alison Krauss, Tanya Tucker, Brad Paisley and bigger names than those, charting 16 singles on Billboard. He’s the only one to win BMI’s Songwriter of the Year for five consecutive years, he’s won two Grammys for Best Country Song, and he’s in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

That formidable catalogue provides the spine for this world premiere musical of nearly two dozen Overstreet songs, in which, ironically, a dysfunctional jukebox holds center stage throughout. As a less than household-name talent, Overstreet knows his rep is not the draw, and with his collaborator, bookwriter Steve Mazur (movies The Little Rascals and Liar, Liar), they have fashioned a workmanlike storyline to carry the hooky tunes.

It’s more reminiscent of a prototype Broadway musical in the pre-Oklahoma! era, where the plot provides the pretext for the ingratiating numbers, which here happen to be commercial country rather than Tin Pan Alley. And Overstreet has mastered the artifice of the novelty or sentimental single, organizing the lyric around a catchy concept yoked to accessible melodies and familiar rhythms, neither too honky nor too tonky. It’s all entertainingly professional in a pleasantly undemanding way, buoyed by Cliff Wagner’s savvy musical direction of the slick house combo.

Set among mid-afternoon drinkers hanging out in a roadside Tennessee bar, The Halfway Home, the banter inevitably concentrates on the contrasting viewpoints of the contending sexes, rooted in clichés about gender roles that underpin the heart and soul of this particular subgenre of pop song, with just the requisite soupcon of reality to allow attitude to masquerade as truth. In fact, the Act 1 twist revolves upon a literal depiction of the Four Ages of Man (condensed from Shakespeare’s Seven) that may strain the abundance of accumulated audience goodwill, though it does create some stakes that pay off adequately in the Act 2

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The slickly scrappy cast brings a lot of charm to Overstreet’s ditties and even some conviction to the schematically strung-out book. Sneaky Ole Time adroitly sidles up to you, nudging one into a mellow buzz of not too challenging glee, surprisingly achieving its aspiration to be a just-good-enough musical amusement to pass the time before the joint fills up. After all, except for the off-label whiskey, everyone’s drinking Bud or Bud Lite.

Ruskin Group Theatre, 3000 Airport Ave., Santa Monic; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. (no perf Sept. 4); through Sept. 19, www.ruskingrouptheatre.com