Steve Cuiffo is Lenny Bruce: Alive in Greenwich Village

Lenny Bruce returns to Greenwich Village for his first club shows in half a century.

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," At (Le) Poisson Rouge–formerly The Village Gate, one of Lenny’s old haunts–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. The Village is not the same, the Beats are gone, but Bruce’s often prophetic, freedom-loving skewering of American culture is as dazzling, hilarious and insightful as ever.

Cuiffo resurrects the fast-rising Bruce of the late 50s and 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 to 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 Village in the Beat era that Bruce loved.