Reverend Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir's MONSANTO IS THE DEVIL Set for Joe's Pub, 11/23-12/21

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 continue 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 Devilwill take place Sundays, November 23 - December 21, at 2pm.Tickets are $15 and can be purchased at www.joespub.com or 212.967.7555.

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.

After the opening performance of Monsanto Is the Devilon November 23, Reverend Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir will take a chartered, 19-hour bus ride from New York to St. Louis for to hold an organic Thanksgiving dinner at Monsanto headquarters on the north end of the city.

On Black Friday, the Choir will return to Ferguson, Missouri, where theReverend and Choir members Tom Tom Ted and Dragonfly recently participated in the October 13 "Moral Monday" protest. Reverend Billy was among 50 clerics-including Reverends Alvin Herring and Michael and Ben McBride, Dr. Cornel West, and Rabbi Susan Talve-arrested in front of the Mayor's office in Ferguson that day. During the protest, Sister Dragonfly hugged a Ferguson Police Sargent. AP photographer Charles Rex Arbogast captured the embrace in an image that has gone viral, garnering over six million views since.

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.