It was improv night at Henotic, Jan. 15. They brought in Roman Danylo, the star of Comedy Inc. on the Comedy Channel as well as was the referee for the comedy channel’s improv Olympics a few years ago and Dean Haglund, who used to be on the X-Files TV show and has also performed with Second City and the Groundlings, to entertain an enthusiastic audience with an hour or so of quick witted improv comedy.
They included the audience in a couple of games including sound effects during which they brought up an audience member on stage to make sound effects for a scene they were acting and another where the audience member had to move the actors according to their dialogue.
They had a lot of really funny bits. In one, Roman got sent out into the cold for a game called criminal, during which the audience chose a scene for him to guess with the help of Haglund’s hints.
After a bit of prodding from Haglund and applause from the audience, he eventually guessed he was supposed to be running a motorboat with his lips in the Strawberry Fields. They also performed the film styles improv game, during which they re-enacted the same scene (returning a video) in several different movie styles including a final scene combining documentary/ porn and horror, which was weird but effective.
Upstairs, The David Harmon experience was playing an assortment of hard rock covers including a very cool version of Kiss’s “Domino.”
—by Richard Amery, L.A. Beat editor