NEW YORK, NY.- Ten years ago, I cringed through an Encores! performance of one of the most odious musicals I’d ever seen. That’s not to throw shade on Encores!, the concert series that dredges up both diamonds and dirt from the musical theater dustbin. But “Irma La Douce,” a 1960 Broadway hit about jolly prostitutes and the men who keep them, was perhaps a dredge too far. Did I mention that it involved penguins?

In a way, it was a relief that the show was so bad: There was nothing to regret in consigning it to my personal catalog of cancellation.

Most of the most offensive musicals of the past are like that, providing their own incontrovertible arguments against revival, except as carefully labeled historical exhibits in some deep-future Encores! season.

On the other hand, the best vintage musicals need no excuses. They should be performed as long as enough people want to see them, and perhaps even longer, until the time is right again.

But between the disposables and the treasurables lies a range of works, middling to excellent, that can still be powerful despite certain problems. Often the problems arise from ways of looking at race and gender that, however progressive in their day, do not meet contemporary expectations. Who, if anyone, has the right perspective to address such works most authentically?

A good answer might start with artists who represent the group that’s objectionably depicted (or gratuitously ignored) in the show itself. And though I’m not a proponent of narrow identity matching, which can shrink a capacious story to a hall of mirrors with just one person inside, I’ve seen several examples recently in which the story is instead expanded. This happens when directors and performers from the communities in question thoughtfully reappropriate material that was once appropriated from them.

The shows cover quite a range of intrinsic quality. “South Pacific” (1949) is a golden age classic; still, it presents the Indigenous population of the islands on which it takes place (now part of Vanuatu) as sexualized, funny-talking exotics. “La Cage aux Folles” (1983) features what might be the epitome of a hummable score, but its book, filled with tired gay ribaldry, can leave you wincing. Even the all-feline “Cats” (1982) manages to offend its constituency, by which I of course mean humans.

Though all three are amply revived, only “South Pacific” has aged well. The rapturous Rodgers and Hammerstein songs are obviously a big part of that. But it helps that the book (by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan) is about something eternally pertinent: the death grip of prejudice. In the main plot, a white nurse stationed at a Seabee base in 1943 falls for a French widower but cannot tolerate that his children are Eurasian. In the secondary plot, Cable, a Marine lieutenant, falls for Liat, a Tonkinese girl, but abandons her rather than face his family’s racism — and his own. Only one story ends happily, the more so because the other doesn’t.

In the exemplary Lincoln Center Theater production that ran on Broadway from 2008 to 2010, director Bartlett Sher found trenchant ways to adjust a story that, as written, is focused almost entirely on the white characters’ anguish. Among other things, he added Black servicemen to the ensemble, segregated from the rest — a historically accurate gesture that wordlessly invoked a bigger picture of prejudice.

The “South Pacific” now playing (through Aug. 11) at Goodspeed Musicals in East Haddam, Connecticut, goes even further, casting a Black actor, Cameron Loyal, as Cable. (The Marine Corps did not commission its first Black officer until 1945, but no matter.) In a staging by Chay Yew, a Singapore-born director, everything lands differently without changing a line. The reaction of the white Seabees to the Black officer, no less than his to them, lights up the entire racial structure of the show. Cable’s connection to and abandonment of Liat elevate and enlarge that story.

As the Rodgers and Hammerstein catalog makes plain — see also “The King and I” and “Flower Drum Song” — appropriation was a goal, not a sin, in those postwar years, when finding commonalities among peoples seemed paramount. Even now, I’d argue, appropriation can be a good thing, when done with sensitivity to honor rather than commodify diverse cultural expressions.

But each time I see “La Cage” it seems to succeed at that less.

Originally, and perhaps of necessity, “La Cage” was a carefully crafted brief for toleration. The creative team — songs by Jerry Herman, book by Harvey Fierstein, direction by Arthur Laurents, all gay men — framed that brief, as the gay rights movement did more generally, in the context of family. Georges, the owner of a drag club in Saint-Tropez, France, lives with Albin, his star drag queen; together they raised Georges’ son, Jean-Michel, who now wants to marry. The problem: His fiancee’s father is an antigay politician.

When “La Cage” opened on Broadway, Georges and Albin were played by straight men — Georges by Gene Barry, best known as TV marshal Bat Masterson. But that sop to expected heterosexual resistance weakened the show’s emotional core. At the final curtain, with the farcical plot resolved and one of those hummable tunes surging in the strings, the couple walked into the sunset with their arms intertwined; that was about the extent of their intimacy. As if in compensation, the drag elements worked overtime to titillate a straight audience, an effect heightened by the fact that two of the 12 so-called Cagelles were played by women.

The show’s Broadway revivals have done no better at suggesting a profound attachment between Georges and Albin. Though gay, the stars of the 2004 revival fought bitterly, and one was fired for it; the leads in 2010 were straight. Nor has Albin — whether as himself or as Zaza, his drag persona — ever felt believably grounded in a human sensibility. In that sense the character has been as “exotic” as Liat.

If the production that closed this month at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, got closer to the complexities of gayness and drag, it may be because Albin was played by an actual drag performer: Alex Michaels, known to fans of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” as Alexis Michelle. Exquisitely decorative but not merely so, he seemed equally real in each part of his role, and when he and Georges (Tom Story) kissed with convincing passion, it was the first time in 40 years I believed those characters loved each other.

It helps that it’s 2024; the actors, relieved of the responsibility of ingratiation and representation, can play the emotions, not the jokes. In that sense, “La Cage” itself has come out of the closet, as the Barrington production, directed by Mike Donahue, understood.

The artwork in Georges and Albin’s apartment (designed by Alexander Woodward) recapitulated the history of gay liberation, with images by J.C. Leyendecker, Egon Schiele, Paul Cadmus and Tom of Finland. There were no female Cagelles. Jean-Michel wore a small earring, as if to honor Zaza as his mother.

At least “La Cage,” like “South Pacific,” began on the right side of history, even if history kept moving the line. But “Cats” was never on the right side of anything. To be sure, it featured memorable imagery and some catchy if overly familiar tunes by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Still, turning T.S. Eliot’s unpretentious doggerel, written for children, into a story of feline reincarnation resulted only in anthropomorphic hokum.

I could not thus have predicted that a new version would have anything to reappropriate. Yet “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” playing through Aug. 11 at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Manhattan, offers a shiny new key to a rusty old lock. Relocating the largely unaltered text to the world of Harlem drag balls, in which contestants compete in glamorous displays of transcendence over poverty and racism, brings the entire story, for the first time, to meaningful, joyful life.

Putting old musicals in new or newly relevant hands (the directors and choreographers of “The Jellicle Ball” are all gay or Black or both) does not guarantee excellent results. We could argue for years about the most recent Broadway “Porgy and Bess,” which improved some elements at the cost of others, or Japanese director Amon Miyamoto’s “Pacific Overtures” in 2004. And despite their innovations, neither the “South Pacific” nor the “La Cage” I enjoyed recently are Broadway ready.

But one of the ways to preserve and expand the musical canon is to let everyone have a shot at it — especially the people so many classics were written about or too often ignored. Who knows, even “Irma La Douce” might benefit one day, if led by a crack team of prostitutes and penguins.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.