In adopting Paula Vogel as its season’s playwright, the Signature Theatre Company should have been making a sure bet. A Pulitzer and Obie award winner, Ms. Vogel’s bittersweet comedies have strong, reliable bone structure. “The Baltimore Waltz” is one of her biggest hits and the ubiquitous Mark Brokaw is at its helm. But bad casting fritters away Ms. Vogel’s wry characters and the production deflates any remaining topical zing.

The play is still visible and admirable – but this might not be the time to see it. It’s a shame.

When Anna (Kristen Johnston) discovers she has a terminal disease that even scares her doctor, her brother Carl (David Marshall Grant) whisks her to Europe in search of a cure. It’s a familiar story: ATD, or Acquired Toilet Disease, only affects single schoolteachers. No one seems in much of a hurry to save her, and no one wants to even discuss how she got it.

Anna and her brother make for Paris, Amsterdam, and Vienna, where Anna discovers her libidinous side and Carl tumbles into a film-noir. When Harry Lime (Jeremy Webb) from “The Third Man” shows up, the dream seems all but over. Somewhere, in a hospital bed, Carl is dying of AIDS, and this shared fantasy will be his last.

This shift requires immense stylization from the “European” section, and gentle realism from the last – and the latter is the most they can manage. Mr. Webb – who plays every waiter, doctor, and seductive bellboy on the Continent – occasionally has the proper dash, but the stars do not.

Director Mark Brokaw tries to manufacture enthusiasm by keeping the staging relatively brisk. Two long white curtains can be drawn like hospital screens, whizzing on and off to show the Third Man in one of his many disguises. Mr. Brokaw and set designer Neil Patel place the entire piece inside a columned, many-windowed loft, which seems to have nothing to do with Baltimore, Europe, hospitals, or film noir.

It does look expensive, though, which casts a sort of confusing gloss over the entire production. In Anne Bogart’s landmark production of Ms. Vogel’s play, it famously only needed a hospital bed. Everything bright and extraneous just throws the piece off its scrappy stride.

The production also ignores the decade – it looks and sounds contemporary, not like the 1980s flashback it is. Perhaps Mr. Brokaw keeps the production unspecific because AIDS still stalks us, homophobia hasn’t left us, and entire countries now face disaster because of the epidemic. But the problems that Ms. Vogel was lampooning – how embarrassment and public prudery prevented real search for the cure – have shift ed (at least in the United States).

Nothing dates so quickly as satire, and nothing kills it faster than fuzzy generalities. In the right hands, Ms. Vogel’s gallows humor can feel spectacularly raw and immediate. It doesn’t feel that way here, and it seems it was the production that cooked it.

***

In “Falling Off Broadway,” a stonily dull solo show, David Black holds forth about his own life from age 8 to 50. It’s not his life that lacks interest – Mr. Black has dabbled in singing opera, mutual funds, Broadway producing, and painting. But watching him narrate his winding path to artistic fulfillment has a paralyzing effect. Attributing his career indecisions to an imposing father and dismissive mother, Mr. Black tries to make his case as a “hardy survivor.” But because the snippets he relates lack all heat, even a depressive episode suffered in the Waldorf-Astoria doesn’t sound all that rough. This was a life with catered breakdowns.

As we file out (one audience member asked in carrying tones, “So many careers, and none of them acting?”), we are met by a lobby full of his paintings. These have a lot of color and life – crude, enthusiastic, and peopled with fun little personalities. If you skip Mr. Black’s nearly deadpan performance, you’ll still have the energy to enjoy them.

“The Baltimore Waltz” at the Peter Norton Space until January 9 (555 W. 42nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-244-7529).

“Falling Off Broadway” at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre until February 20 (416 W. 42nd Street, 212-279-4200).