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The brilliant 80-minute-long revamping of the Gilbert & Sullivan classic is so good, you’ll leave with with sore cheeks from grinning throughout the entire show. The not-so-swashbuckling pirates lack both swords and swagger, but make up for these shortcomings — and then some. They’re extraordinarily talented musicians who meander about while playing guitars, banjos, an accordion, a squeezebox, spoons and a saw.

…the American Repertory Theater is presenting a spirited, affectionate, and nearly irresistible sendup of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance’’ by the Hypocrites, a Chicago-based troupe.

The Hypocrites production of Sean Graney’s adaptation of “The Pirates of Penzance” has landed on the mainstage of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.

Film, theater, music and dance collaboratively collide for five delicious acts in which the allegoric tale of an organic potted lily’s desire to marry a human is told.

“Lily’s Revenge” is an epic journey; gorgeously designed, emphatically played and oddly disarming. What I came away with was that Taylor Mac is an extraordinarily talented and generous artist willing to share his vision with his cast and his audience. At its final curtain, the tiny Oberon stage bursts with a garishly made-up lunatic crew in garish colors, sequins, leather, spandex, feathers, petticoats, top hats, headdresses and bridal attire, all celebrating the much-maligned and over-used term, diversity. This was one wedding party I was thrilled to attend.

Epic in length and campy, surrealistic, surprisingly clever and entertaining in content may be one way to describe Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge at the American Repertory Theatre’s Oberon Theatre. Another way would be to describe it as and Opus Magnus bouillabaisse of witty vaudeville schtick, English Music Hall audience participation and Weimar decadence literally flowered with bigger than life drag queens, preposterous flower girls, vignettes and dance numbers and sprinkled heavily with poetry, philosophy, brides and grooms, dieties, musical flowers and other seemingly real but fantasy stock figures. There is even a murderous Pope.