Rev Bill & The Stop Shopping Choir to Bring 'HoneyBeeLujah!' to Joe's Pub, 5/4 - 6/22

Yesterday Rev Bill and The Stop Shopping Choir conducted their 2nd action at the Harvard Microbiotics Lab where scientists are developing the "Robobee," a drone-like pollinator device that is designed to replace Honey Bees and is exemplary of the "Big Ag" complex.

Reverend Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir, who first rose to international attention for their music-based challenge to consumerism, have turned their attention to big corporations' role in climate disruption. They take up the plight of the Honey Bee in their new campaign, HoneyBeeLujah!, which they bring to Joe's Pub at The Public (425 Lafayette St, NYC) in TheHoneyBeeLujah Show, May 4 - June 22.

The Choir launched the campaign with an action in which Reverend Billy delivered the Choir's new manifesto, in Times Square, earlier this month, and with a visit yesterday to the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, where scientists are developing the "Robobee," a drone-like pollinator device that is designed to replace Honey Bees and is exemplary of the "Big Ag" complex. In these actions, as they will at Joe's Pub, the Choir performs adorned and accompanied by hundreds of Honey Bees handmade by Savitri D and the rest of the Choir's 40 singer-activists. In the coming weeks, over the course of the run at Joe's Pub, they will perform more of these "swarmings" in and around the property of Monsanto and Bayer, Home Depot and Lowes-the corporations that drench the land with bee-killing pesticides and GMO crops.

Reverend Billy says, "The Honey Bee is an indicator species, signaling wider troubles in the biosphere. Populations have plunged by nearly half. The bee's extinction, so vital to the human's food supply, suggests our own survival problems in the era of apocalyptic climate change."

This week, as the Choir readies its new show, Stop Shopping Books reissues The Reverend Billy Project, the most extensive account of the troupe's years of activism-starting with the early Starbucks "casting out of demons from cash registers," continuing across several continents, up to the Reverend's run for Mayor of New York City in 2009. A chapter on the fight to stop the clear-cutting of Boreal forests by paper suppliers of Victoria's Secret catalogues anticipates the Choir's more recent earth activism. Written by the director of the troupe's performances, Savitri D, and Bill Talen, the writer/actor who inhabits the title character Reverend Billy, the book is an inside look at the process of creating small-but-explosive spectacles that stop people in their tracks and make them think, even in today's over-stocked mental environment.

The HoneyBeeLujah Show will run for eight consecutive Sundays at 2pm. Directed by Savitri D., with Music DirectorNehemiah Luckett, the performances will feature the 40-member Stop Shopping Choir, fronted by their eco-televangelist, Reverend Billy, and accompanied by the five-piece Not Buying It Band. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased atwww.joespub.com or 212.967.7555.

The upcoming Joe's Pub engagement follows the Choir's sold-out 2013 holiday season run at the prestigious venue, which, along with performances in bank lobbies and New York courts, decried lending institutions that are financing resource-extraction and are, by extension, responsible for climate destruction. In the shows last November and December, and in non-violent bank lobby actions leading up to those performances, the singers inhabited the character of the Golden Toad, a small amphibian forced into extinction by extreme climate change in Central America in the late 80s. For one of these performances, at a JPMorgan Chase location on September 12, 2013, prosecutors demanded a year in prison and $30k bail for William Talen (aka Reverend Billy) and Nehemiah Luckett. The 15-minute performance earned criminal charges of "Riot," "Menacing" and "Unlawful Assembly." Those charges have been dropped, but the trial continues. The defendants are pleading innocent of all charges, including trespassing and unlawful assembly.

The Choir's 2013 performances at Joe's Pub and in bank lobbies were part of a national tour, during which The Huffington Post wrote, "Few souls are blessed with proper amounts of spunk and Earth-justice panache as Reverend Billy. And even fewer of them have the ability to spawn a successful tour that raises the level of awareness about the link between big banks and the eroding environment. But leave it to this eclectic performing artist/preacher-so robust, so postmodern-Elvis-and his passionate posse to artfully descend upon the masses with something so distinctly one-of-a-kind."

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

Joe's Pub at The Public is one of New York City's most celebrated venues for emerging and established performance artists. Named for Public Theater founder Joe Papp, Joe's Pub debuted 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 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. The diverse roster of programming featured at Joe's Pub includes top performers from Broadway, cabaret, dance, world, jazz, country, and indie genres, as well as New York Voices, its commissioning initiative. Joe's Pub also collaborates with other Public Theater programs to present events such as the Under the Radar Incoming series and the Public Forum lecture and debate series. The New York Timeshas praised Joe's Pub as at the "nexus" of "a downtown axis of clubs whose performers gleefully fuzz the boundaries between old and new, and between pop, rock, jazz, rhythm-and-blues, swing, country, world music and performance art."

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