Bloomsday 2017 – Friday night

Image: Fearsome transvestite dominatrix Bella Cohen channels Helen Clark in last year’s Bloomsday.

See the NZ Labour Party caught between Justin Trudeau and Jeremy Corbyn in this Friday’s Bloomsday show!

See Unite Union’s Joe Carolan featuring once more as the apoplectic patriot, The Citizen!

See transvestite dominatrix Bella Cohen casting her heavily mascaraed eyes across Labour’s Budget Responsibility!

Bloomsday will be on for one night only, Friday night, June 16, at the Thirsty Dog, Karangahape Rd.

It starts at 7.30pm and runs for three hours.

Also on the billboard will be 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 Ring’s Bruce Hopkins as Bella Cohen.

As well there’ll be Linn Lorkin and the Jews Brothers Band, the QED Barbershop Quartet, mezzo-soprano Yuko Takahashi, Hershal Herscher, Farrell Cleary, Brian Keegan, Jean McAllister.

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

On 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 dramatisations from Ulysses.

And Joe Carolan will sing “James Connolly.”

Three hours of jaw-dropping sensation.

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