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May 11, 2017

To make a cult, it takes a failure. On that count, “The Golden Apple,” a musical retelling of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” set in Washington State around 1900, certainly qualifies. Though it opened to positive reviews at the Phoenix Theater in 1954, and was the first Off Broadway musical ever to transfer to Broadway, it flopped almost as soon as it arrived.

But failure alone does not suffice. A cult musical must also plummet directly into obscurity; if too many people know about it, how can it be the exclusive delight of connoisseurs? Then, too, there must be something of great quality that justifies the delight, and also something that doesn’t. The best such musicals are a bit outré, a bit funky, a bit too fey or fine to survive in their own time, and maybe even in ours. This is why we have the Encores! series, whose mission to glorify the peculiar treasures in America’s musical-theater attic has brought us such otherwise unproducible works as the Gershwins’ “Pardon My English” and, earlier this season, Cole Porter’s “The New Yorkers.” The revival of “The Golden Apple” that opened Wednesday night at City Center tops them all, not only in being the cultiest cult musical Encores! has ever attempted, but also in making a marvelous if last-ditch case for it.

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