June 1, 2017

BLOOMSDAY 2017  

Auckland’s annual Bloomsday show is on again this month, Friday June 16, at the Thirsty Dog in Karangahape Rd, one night only.  

It starts at 7.30pm and runs for three hours.  

This year’s show has Lucy Lawless returning as Gerty MacDowell, Jennifer Ward-Lealand reading from Molly Bloom’s notorious monologue, Michael Hurst as a British squaddie (and singing Finnegan’s Wake) and Lord of the Rings’ Bruce Hopkins as a transvestite dominatrix.

Others in the show are Linn Lorkin and the Jews Brothers Band, the QED Barbershop Quartet, mezzo-soprano Yuko Takahashi, Hershal Herscher, Farrell Cleary, Brian Keegan, Jean McAllister and Unite Union organiser Joe Carolan as the apoplectic patriot The Citizen.

Bloomsday is the recreation of that single day in 1904 in which Irish writer James Joyce set his 20^th century comic masterpiece, Ulysses.

On that that long, lingering, legendary date, Leopold Bloom, wandering Jew and melancholic hero of Joyce’s book, set about a droll odyssey round Dublin.

In Dublin-Paris-Rome-Trieste, in London-New York-Beijing-Sydney, there’ll be readings and chamber music remembering the fictional event.

In Auckland, a bawdy Bloomsday vaudeville has been celebrated every year on June 16 to packed houses at the Thirsty Dog Tavern, Karangahape Rd.

This year’s show will feature Irish ballads, Jewish klezmer, Catholic hymns, Leon Redbone, Guiseppe Verdi, Tinpan Alley, Brecht/Weill, Leon Redone, and Edith Piaf.

And The Supremes.

And boisterous dramatizations from Ulysses.