Another worldwide tango show has arrived in New York, in the sixth year of its never-ending tour. Tanguera – a Movin’ Out-style musical, at City Center until October 18 – is too dumb and unambitious to hate, though one can certainly resent it.

You know where the threadbare story is headed as soon as our greenhorn heroine, Giselle of Paris, struts down the gangplank in bare legs and raincoat. The hulky dockworker she bumps into – bing, they’re in love! – will rescue her from the stylish Buenos Aires pimps stealing her away to their bordello, but only after she’s had to service the stoop-shouldered, myopic and middle-aged. (The other girls get the young, muscled and bronzed.)

Better “Banguera”, in which Giselle leaves her loyal dockworker for the boas, bustiers and paid sex. It would oppress less. Tanguera depends on a simple opposition: the bad guys, with whom the whores don’t want to dance but must, versus the good guys, with whom they want to dance but aren’t allowed. In other words, half the numbers represent unwilling intimacy (to put it squeamishly). The performers couldn’t actually be doing these perfectly calibrated leg waggles without consent, though, so why not a story that doesn’t require so much pretence on their part and suspension of disbelief on ours?

Still, Tanguera would have been less awful if choreographer Mora Godoy had treated the soft-porn plot as a dancemaker’s challenge: since tango is built on opposition (push and pull, stop and start), by what subtle, inventive means might one distinguish the voluntary numbers from the forced kind – sexy power from sadism?

The women do turn their heads away when dancing with the pimps, and their hippity-hops resemble a futile attempt to escape. But they mainly signal recalcitrance by frowning. Meanwhile, the romantic encounters move as fast, with nearly as much brusqueness from the men, as the compulsory routines.

The steps only grow slower and finer for the 71-year-old one-time Tango Argentino lead Maria Nieves – and then only sometimes. When given a chance, she dances an itch yet to become a scratch; she dances the placement of her hand in his. Everything counts, as if time were made of water.