Steve Cuiffo gained early prominence as a magician, winning major awards at a young age, but sleight of hand has evolved into sleight of man. One man in particular, and that would be the very particular Lenny Bruce.
The comic and social satirist, who once got arrested in San Francisco for saying "cocksucker" on stage, is returning to the city and the theater where he appeared 54 years to the day when Steve Cuiffo is Lenny Bruce begins a three-performance run at the Curran Theatre on Nov. 19. It's part of the Curran's Under Construction series with both performers and audiences on stage while the theater is undergoing renovation.
Although acquitted of obscenity after his 1961 SF arrest, authorities across the country, and even across the oceans, began monitoring and/or banning Bruce's performances, and many more arrests followed. Bruce's last recorded performance was at the Berkeley Community Theatre in 1965, and the last performance of his life was at the Fillmore in SF in 1966. The Berkeley recording presents a lucid and on-point Bruce, while the Fillmore appearance a year later was recalled as a paranoid's ramblings in presenter Bill Graham's memoirs. Six weeks later Bruce was dead from what the L.A. coroner ruled was an accidental overdose of morphine.
For his Curran appearance, Cuiffo will deliver a compilation of Bruce's iconic routines on a range of topics that includes organized religion, race, illegal and prescription drugs, sexual mores, obscenity, and the Constitution. Cuiffo first got hooked on Lenny Bruce in 2006, when he listened to a box set of Bruce's recordings hoping for inspiration for a stage satire of Dr. Strangelove that he was developing.
"I don't know why, but Lenny Bruce just hooked into me," Cuiffo told an interviewer a few years ago. He spent many hours studying recordings and videos of Bruce's performances trying to capture Bruce's intonations, rhythms, and timing. "Most people probably won't catch it, but it's gotten to the point where I actually get upset with myself if I miss an 'uh.'"
Cuiffo believes the best way to understand Bruce is to see his work in a live situation rather than through recordings or YouTube clips. "I don't know how he'd feel about any of this," Cuiffo said, "my trying to make myself a beat-by-beat simulacrum of him. I hope he'd see the sincerity."
Tickets are available at sfcurran.com.