Nothing quite compares to settling into your seat, opening your Playbill, and finding an apology for the musical you’re about to see.

That’s essentially what happens at the witless film-noir parody “Adrift in Macao,” which features in its program a lengthy and curious statement from bookwriter/lyricist Christopher Durang. In it, Mr. Durang — who in the past has located deeply uncomfortable laughs in everything from organized religion to miscarriages to castration — prepares the audience for something a bit different. He calls “Adrift” one of his “friendly, silly plays,” compares it to one of Graham Greene’s “entertainments,” and gives assurances that it was “written in a good mood.”

Well, at least someone had fun.

Mr. Durang, composer Peter Melnick, and director Sheryl Kaller have cribbed extensively from the tropes of noir, with its seedy locales, hard-bitten private dicks, nefarious “ethnic” characters, and slinky dames with snub-nose pistols. This time the stubbly American (Alan Campbell), hot on the heels of an elusive villain named Mr. MacGuffin, broods his way through the underbelly of the titular port city with the help of a seen-it-all nightclub chanteuse (Rachel de Benedet) circa 1952.

This is hardly virgin territory: Everyone from Danny Kaye to Garrison Keillor to Bugs Bunny has poked fun at the overheated, underlit genre, and Mr. Durang himself had a crack at it (along with dozens of other Hollywood styles) 30 years ago in “A History of the American Film.” More to the point, Cy Coleman, Larry Gelbart, and David Zippel tweaked film noir brilliantly in 1989 with their whip-smart “City of Angels.” This musical go-around is more like purgatory, stuffed with belabored quips, obvious plot twists, and tedious lyrics:

It’s like pea soup,
Except it’s gray.
Pea soup is green.
Well, anyway…

Mr. Melnick’s jazzy score actually outclasses the efforts of his far better-known lyricist, with the sprightly duet “Sparks” and the piano-bar kiss-off “So Long” standing out. Choreographer Christopher Gattelli gets an unexpected amount of mileage out of his faux-Chinoiserie nightclub routines, and while Ms. Kaller may allow Orville Mendoza (as the mysterious manservant Tempura) and Michelle Ragusa (as an opium-addicted showgirl) a bit too much liberty, it’s hard to begrudge anyone in the seven-person cast for scaring up whatever laughs they can. Mr. Campbell and Ms. de Benedet, meanwhile, perform creditably as the romantic leads.

With the exception of a few names (Tempura is so called “because I have been battered by life”), the funniest bits are retreads of earlier Durang works. A drawn-out sequence in which Ms. de Benedet must fake her way through a torch song borrows heavily from “The Actor’s Nightmare,” and “A History of the American Film” covered much of the same ground in a fraction of the time. (“Adrift” was originally conceived as a 20-minute skit.) Mr. Durang isn’t the only pro to come up short: Michael Starobin, an orchestrator of almost unmatched versatility, relies on tinny, anachronistic synthesizer sounds to bolster the five-piece band.

Whenever Mr. MacGuffin’s name comes up, various characters stop the show dead in its tracks to describe the origin of that name. Alfred Hitchcock used it to describe the seemingly crucial but ultimately inconsequential plot element that allow the creators to set the plot in motion. A means to an end, in other words.

But what good is a means to an end if you’re not going anywhere — or at least nowhere that others haven’t already gone with considerably more success? Not even the pun-happy gumshoes and gun molls of “Adrift in Macao” have a snappy retort to that question.

Until March 4 (59 E. 59th St., between Park and Madison avenues, 212-279-4200).