Over the last year, Reverend Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir have applied their signature musical activism to counteracting big corporations' role in climate disruption. By turns attracting acclaim and threats of jail time, Reverend Billy and the singers, led by director Savitri D. and musical director Nehemiah Luckett, have performed in investment banks, pollinator drone labs, Walmart back aisles and waist deep in the surf off Coney Island to dramatize the sea level rise from climate change. They conclude this banner year with Monsanto Is the Devil, which they will perform with the five-piece Not Buying It Band at Joe's Pub at The Public (425 Lafayette St, NYC) on five consecutive Sundays this holiday season.
Performances of Monsanto Is the Devil will take place Sundays, November 23 - December 21, at 2pm. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased at
www.joespub.com or 212.967.7555.
After the opening performance of Monsanto Is the Devil on November 23, the troupe will travel to Ferguson, Missouri for a concert in sympathy with resistance to police violence, and then will march to Monsanto headquarters on the north end of St. Louis for an organic Thanksgiving dinner.
Monsanto Is the Devil marks a return by Reverend Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir to Joe's Pub, where they performed their highly successful HoneyBeeLujah Show in May and June of this year. That show was part of a larger HoneyBeeLujah! campaign including multiple visits to the Harvard Microrobotics Lab where scientists are developing the "Robobee," a drone-like pollinator device designed to replace Honey Bees. In those actions, and in The HoneyBeeLujah Show, the Choir were adorned and accompanied by hundreds of Honey Bees handmade by Savitri D. and the rest of the Choir's members.
Now, in turning their attention to Monsanto, Reverend Billy and the Choir confront the company most responsible for drenching the land with pesticides and GMO crops that kill bees and biodiversity.
Last holiday season, when the Choir performed its first long-running holiday show at Joe's Pub, prosecutors were demanding a year in prison and $30k bail for William Talen (aka Reverend Billy) and Nehemiah Luckett, for a 15-minute performance they gave, dressed as the extinct Golden Toad, September 12, 2013 at a JPMorgan Chase location in Manhattan. Talen and Luckett faced criminal charges of "Riot," "Menacing" and "Unlawful Assembly" for the performance, one of numerous appearances decrying the lending institutions financing climate destruction.
The Stop Shopping Choir's members are volunteers, politicized over the years by the Earth's crisis, shuttling in and out of the Stop Shopping performances to their jobs in Broadway plays, science labs and law offices. Their adventures create the content for their Joe's Pub performances, which resemble hijacked church services (with the patriarchial god noticeably absent). The Stop Shoppers tend to pray to things like "Earth" and "Life." Their Shopocalypse services are a haven for humans in flight from fundamentalism.
About Reverend Billy - Reverend Billy has won an OBIE Award, the Alpert Award, The Dramalogue Award and The Historic Districts Council's Preservation Award (for leading demonstrations to save Manhattan's Poe House), and has been jailed more than 50 times. He was a central figure of Occupy Wall Street and toured 25 OWS tent communities from Zurich to Oakland, CA with the Stop Shopping Choir. He has run for New York City mayor on the Green Party ticket. Reverend Billy has released three CDs, three documentary films, published two books, and produced eight 28-minute television shows as part of the The Last Televangelist, broadcast on the cable channel Free Speech Television. Savitri D and the Reverend are frequent guests of news media, having appeared on The Today Show, CBS Evening News, Nightline, Fox News, Al-Jazeera,
Glenn Beck, Hannity & Colmes, Democracy Now, NPR's "All Things Considered" and "Marketplace,"
Geraldo Rivera, CNN, The Tavis Smiley Show, The BBC World Service, BBC 1 and numerous other local and regional affiliates and International print outlets.
About the Stop Shopping Choir - The Stop Shopping Choir is an all-ages, 40-member singing group, under the direction of Savitri D, with musical director Nehemiah Luckett and lead singer Laura Newman. The choir represents a diverse array of economic, ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds and has members from every continent except Antarctica, which they're working on. Among them are scientists, teachers, artists, therapists, welders, cyclists, builders, developers, hairdressers, dog walkers, actors, truck drivers, tech geeks, scholars and executives. The Choir has toured in Europe, Africa, South America and throughout North America. They are the subject of
Morgan Spurlock's second feature film, What Would Jesus Buy?
About The Church of Stop Shopping - The Church of Stop Shopping is a New York City based radical performance community, with 50 performing members and a congregation in the thousands. They are wild anti-consumerist gospel shouters and earth loving urban activists who have worked with communities on four continents defending land, life and imagination from reckless development and the extractive imperatives of global capital. They employ multiple tactics and creative strategies, including cash register exorcisms, retail interventions, and cell phone operas. They are entertainers and artists, performing regularly throughout the US and Europe. Over the years of church service-like shows - Reverend Billy has canonized Joan Baez,
Kurt Vonnegut,
Justin Vivian Bond, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Tim DeChristopher,
Bertha Lewis, the Yes Men, Dr. Benjamin Barber and
Jennifer Miller the Bearded Lady into "Fabulous Sainthood" in the Church of Stop Shopping.
About Joe's Pub at The Public - Named for Public Theater founder Joe Papp, Joe's Pub at The Public opened in 1998 and plays a vital role in The Public's mission of supporting young artists while providing established artists with an intimate space to perform and develop new work. Joe's Pub consistently presents the best in live music and performance nightly, continuing its commitment to diversity, production values, community and artistic freedom. The organization also offers unique opportunities like
New York Voices, an artist-commissioning program that provides musicians the resources and tools needed to develop original theater works. Commissioned artists have included
Ethan Lipton, Toshi Reagon,
Bridget Everett,
Allen Toussaint and more. In 2011, the Pub received a top-to-bottom renovation, leading to improved sightlines, expanded seating capacity and a new menu from acclaimed Chef Andrew Carmellini. With its intimate atmosphere and superior acoustics, Joe's Pub presents talent from all over the world as part of The Public's programming downtown at its Astor Place home, hosting approximately 800 shows and serving over 100,000 audience members annually.
