SURREY — Roman Danylo likes playing a character named Chip as much as the next guy, but this is ridiculous.
The Vancouver-based performer plays Chip Rock in “The Comic Strippers,” an improv-comedy parody of the male-stripper genre.
As Danylo explains, more than one guy named Chip struts the stage during the show, which comes to Surrey later this month.
“A lot of this show, it’s crazy, weird and interesting how it develops,” he told the Now. “At the very first two-man show we did of this a few years ago, with me and Chris (Casillan), I came out and said, ‘Hi, my name is Chip,’ and Chris is there and everybody expects him to say, ‘My name is Dale,’ right? But I thought it’d be funny if he said, ‘Hi my name is also Chip.’ And when we started adding more people to the show, everybody’s name become Chip. And now we have all these stupid last names, like Chip Dip, Chip Otle, Chip Sahoy, and we keep jamming on these dumb last names.”
The Chip-y characters are “semi-dressed and completely unscripted” for the adult-only show, which promises to be a source of laughs for all genders.
“The Comic Strippers,” winner of the Best Live Production at the 2016 Canadian Comedy Awards, stars Danylo and Casillan with three other veteran players of Vancouver TheatreSports League, including David Milchard, Pearce Visser and Ken Lawson.
The guys try to be sexy, but it just comes across as funny, with plenty of beefy dancing, gyrating and banter.
The show will be staged at Bell Performing Arts Centre on Saturday, Jan. 28.
“I think this is the first show we’ll being doing in Surrey, but it’s all been going for a few years now,” Danylo noted. “It kind of exploded out of this crazy idea I had about parodying the male-stripper genre in a full show, after my wife had come home from seeing one of those shows, and I don’t think anybody had done that in this kind of format.”
(STORY CONTINUES BELOW VIDEO)
Danylo has appeared in several comedy TV series and shows in recent years, including “Comedy Inc.” and “Show Me Some Funny.”
With “The Comic Strippers,” he’s produced a hit stage show that has played venues around the world.
“The response has been crazy right from day one,” Danylo said. “One of our first bookings was this theatre in Fort McMurray, and it was sold out a few weeks before we got there. So that was interesting, and then we took it all the way to the Adelaide Fringe Festival, the second largest fringe festival in the world.”
The “crazy, fun, stupid adventure” is self-produced, for the most part, allowing Danylo and fellow “Comic Strippers” to pick and choose cities and venues.
“We did some shows in the U.S. last year, and we’re Canadian boys, right? So if we can kind of go anywhere with the show, why not figure out how to bring it to California during the winter, right? So we’re going there, to places like Modesto, Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara, and we’re even flying to Kauai in February, just adding that one. You only live once so you might as well go for it.”
A documentary film about the show – “a real documentary about fake strippers” – was made early on, and it’s available for download (on a “pay what you can” basis) from the website, Thecomicstrippers.com/documentary.
“A lot of this show, it’s just inexplicable, and David says this a lot: How can we explain some of the bits we do?” Danylo said. “It’s basically stripper-themed twists on improv games, with private-table scenes, shower scenes, we do something with ping-pong balls that you have to see to believe, and it’s a little bit ‘Blue Man Group’ mixed with ‘Whose Line is it Anyway’ mixed with ‘Thunder From Down Under’ – just a mixed bag of ridiculous stuff.”
• Tickets for “The Comic Strippers” show in Surrey are $42 via Bellperformingartscentre.com, or call 604-507-6355.
tom.zillich@thenownewspaper.com
