STEVE CUIFFO IS LENNY BRUCE

"Anyone familiar with Bruce's seismic impact on generations of comics will find Cuiffo's performance a revelation. It's as close as you can come to seeing the real thing."  -NY Post

The celebrated performer Steve Cuiffo has immersed himself in the work of Lenny Bruce, delivering sublime, hyper-real, verbatim resurrections of the great American thinker’s monologues. The New York Times has declared, “Lenny Bruce is brought back from the dead in the form of Mr. Cuiffo.”  Cuiffo will perform a compilation of Bruce “bits” on still-hot topics, including organized religion, race, illegal and prescription drugs, sexual mores, obscenity and the Constitution. It’s 50 years later, but Bruce’s often prophetic, freedom-loving skewering of American culture is as dazzling, hilarious and insightful as ever.

In Steve Cuiffo Is Lenny Bruce, Cuiffo resurrects the fast-rising Bruce of the early `60s, in the sky's-the-limit period before he became a fixation for lawmen and lost his cabaret license in a downhill spiral toward premature death. There is no film or video of Bruce from this period; Cuiffo's characterization arises from his study and synthesis of the rhythms, delivery and vocal attributes of Lenny's audio recordings, and the jazz and finger-snapping tempos of the Beat era that Bruce loved.

Cuiffo’s obsession with the late American visionary began when he performed a brief impersonation of Bruce delivering his "bit" about the war on terror as part of The Foundry Theatre’s Major Bang. Cuiffo has studied the bulk of Bruce’s recorded material and presented portions of it in various shows and venues such as Joe’s Pub, St. Ann's Warehouse and Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series. New York Magazine has called Cuiffo’s impersonation “masterful” and “eerily accurate,” adding, “[Cuiffo] gives contemporary audiences a sense of [Bruce’s] anarchic presence.” 

Promotional support for Steve Cuiffo’s presentation provided by On the Boards.