Impromptones: Merrily, They Sing Along

What happens when you mix four singers, a pianist and improvisational comedy? With the Impromptones at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel’s Cinegrill, you get 90 zany minutes of sidesplitting laughs.

These squeaky-clean men dressed in 1950s-style black and turquoise two-tone bowling shirts will have you sneezing up your required drinks as their eyes roll, eyebrows twitch and faces contort while they careen from campy to corny comedy. With Michael Pollock on the piano, singers James Thomas Bailey, Jeff Davis, Joe Whyte and Eric Wood bravely try to forge tight harmonies and reasonable lines of lyrical thought. The humor never slides into the gutter, making this clean enough for young children.

Asking the audience for suggestions, the quintet creates song after song, with each of the four singers adding on to the lyrics or singing backup. On Monday night, they crafted a ditty about funeral homes and another about buckets of urine.

Later, they contemplated what it would be like to have a lounge act in a convenience store with romantic lines like “join me and the nitrates” and “can’t you and me both get arterial sclerosis tonight?” A polka about Disneyland, a calypso song about rat dogs and a hip-hop song about Alan Thicke were all hysterically performed with the right amount of saccharine sincerity.

To end the evening, the Impromptones created a pop opera about an audience member’s distressing experience on an airplane. What resulted was an interesting mix of goofiness that wasn’t particularly bound by logic. These men obviously enjoy the evening of word and melody games so much that even when the lyric rhyme patterns fail or the story line becomes a bit odd, everyone is having too much fun to care.

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* The Impromptones, Cinegrill, Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, 7000 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Mondays, 8 p.m. Ends Jan. 26. $10, plus two-drink minimum. (213) 871-1193. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.