Magazine tells story onstage
In many ways, there is a sort of reverse-engineered genius to Pop-Up Magazine Productions, the company behind the live magazine event Pop-Up Magazine and its print cousin, the California Sunday Magazine.
While classic journalistic titles have in recent years attempted to redefine their medium, from podcasts and visual media to live talks, Pop-Up Magazine began first, in 2009, with the idea of novelty in journalism — that is, a live multimedia “magazine” of original stories, presented on a stage by various creatives — before founding its more traditional print publication, California Sunday, in 2014.
“We came the other way,” Doug McGray, co-founder and editor in chief of Pop-Up Magazine and California Sunday, says outside their offices in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco.
What’s more, while news media often strategize content around fleeting attention spans in an age of clicks, Pop-Up Magazine, McGray says, is guided by the notion of memorable storytelling consumed all at once, in stillness, inside a dark theater. Shows, which feature a cast of often well-known storytellers, are never recorded or posted online.
The same kind of principle stands for the bimonthly California Sunday. Beyond its modern, minimalist cover, each issue is populated primarily by the in-depth, long-form feature reporting that has become rarefied. A recent issue presents a fascinating sprawl of reportage: Feature stories detail, hour by hour, the various facets of a day in the lives of contemporary American teenagers.
Yet for all of its precocious brilliance and success — the Pop-Up Magazine live magazine now tours the country with three seasonal shows a year, while California Sunday has already earned several National Magazine Award nominations — none of it was ever planned, says McGray.
In 2009, McGray gathered with a few others with a “hobby” in mind: “What if we took all those different worlds — film, photography and radio and writing — and mixed it up and made it a show for the fans of all that kind of stuff ?”
It’s the same basic idea that is manifested in each of their shows now, which feature reporting of all kinds in the vein of a general interest magazine. Only back then, it was planned more simply, for one show at the Brava Theater, with no longterm vision in mind. From there, the project grew organically, and swiftly.
“Almost immediately we had to move a bigger theater and then had to move again to a bigger theater,” McGray says. “Pretty soon we found ourselves at Davies Symphony Hall and doing more and more ambitious things.”
The forthcoming Winter Show will run at the Curran Theater on Feb. 1-2 before touring select cities nationwide.
Each edition is now backed by unique production tailored to each story — narration, an original score with a live band, visual components and, at times, interactive elements with the audience. Presentations range from reportage on war, tales of friendship, a dissection of the geopolitical history behind our cooking spices, or, as in this Winter Show, a story told by the audience itself in a choose-yourown-adventure scenario.
Storytellers themselves — some of whom Pop-Up Magazine reaches out to and vice versa — range from Oscarwinning filmmakers and bestselling authors to a “24-year-old writer who has a great story idea,” McGray says. If it’s compelling, it deserves its place onstage. The forthcoming show will feature players like filmmaker Veena Rao, National Geographic photojournalist David Guttenfelder and author Jon Mooallem.
“There’s something about producing that kind of story that will stick with you, and you’ll remember it a year later. You’ll remember it five years later. And it will help you make sense of the rest. It will help you make sense of everything that’s flying at you.”