It was an attractive idea – to put Ballet Hispanico onstage with Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra for an evening recapturing the legendary Palladium nightclub in the 1950s, at the height of the mambo craze. And “Palladium Nights” was prettily staged on Friday night,with a lovely dais for the band under three paper lanterns and little cabaret tables off to the sides. For their part, the musicians played gloriously and the dancers moved gorgeously.

The only hitch was that the choreographer of “Palladium Nights,” Willie Rosario, was unable to go toe-to-toe with brilliant composers like Tito Puente, Mario Bauza, and Chico O’Farrill (Arturo O’Farrill’s late father, and the Palladium’s house composer and arranger). While the music alternately soared and smoldered, Mr. Rosario’s dance was a Broadway cartoon.

It was apparent from the get-go that Mr. Rosario, a protege of Graciela Daniele who works frequently in theater, film, and television, was going for a Broadway effect. Out came the cast of generic characters: a vamp with a long cigarette holder, an uber-geek, a hussy, a sailor, a schoolgirl, a naughty librarian, a Casanova in a red bolero jacket. There was one together-forever couple, distinguishable by their matching gold outfits. (This was the type of show in which lovers always wear the same color.)

Mr. Rosario had clearly coached all the subtlety out of the dancers, who stuck doggedly to their caricatured roles. They had the pasted-on smiles of couples at a ballroom competition. No one brought any anguish or boredom into the nightclub; no one was lonely. No one found release after a hard week at work.No one got drunk and started making out in a corner. No one went home early. It was a nightclub with no soul, whose denizens seemed as plastic as Barbie dolls.

The plot points were appropriately flat and generic. Inevitably, the naughty librarian put down her book and took off her jacket and danced. Inevitably, the vamp tried to break up the golden couple; just as inevitably, they quarreled and then reconciled.

While all this stage business was going on, they danced.They swayed to the mambo “on two,” starting on the second beat, in the Palladium tradition, a dance of great energy and sass. This was the best choreography of the evening – the partnering in group numbers, with its infinite variations and its rhythmic intricacies.

But even here, there was nothing of the true atmosphere of a club, none of its spontaneity. No dancer ever stopped what she was doing to watch another dancer’s cool step and try to imitate it. Typically the group fanned out in perfectly spaced pinwheel formations, as if in a Vegas floor show.

In the duets and small ensembles,Mr. Rosario favored splashy, applause-generating stunts that looked like ice-skating moves. Girls were grabbed by the arms and spun around fast in circles, their bodies skimming the floor. On one occasion, a man bench-pressed a woman’s prone body up behind his neck, balanced her across his shoulders, and spun her around at high speeds. All these tricks got a hand, but they cheapened the overall effect.

During musical solos, the dancers feigned over-the-top conversation at the cabaret tables, accomplishing nothing other than to distract us from some very good jazz. Sitting on their dais behind the dancers, the band members might as well have been wallpaper, as far as Mr. Rosario was concerned.

Mr. Rosario ended up working so far away from the living, breathing atmosphere of a nightclub that I wonder why he was chosen to create “Palladium Nights.” Friday evening’s performance was especially strange in light of the fact that Ballet Hispanico happens to have in its repertoire an exhilarating dance from 2000 called “Club Havana,” created by the company’s former lead dancer, Pedro Ruiz.In Mr.Ruiz’s piece, too, there is haute glamour and costumes and attitude. But in “Club Havana,”you can feel a life stirring in each character.

Mr. Rosario’s characters, in contrast, are Broadway likenesses – shorthand stereotypes with perky demeanors. And they only look more artificial when placed next to a group of soulful musicians playing a hot Cuban-bebop blend. The music of “Palladium Nights” had the flair, the virtuosity, and the swagger of a legendary place and time. The dance, unfortunately, did not.