Move Over, Harry Potter
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Trish Lindsay trained as an architect and came to Chicago in 1991 to work for Eva Maddox Associates. She redesigned some hospital and museum gift shops and says she realized that what nonprofits really needed were better products to sell. By 1993, she and Rick Carton–an artist she’d hooked up with after admiring the posters he did for his band Tarnations–had founded Treehouse Productions, a toy company with a storefront on Lincoln Avenue. “We made educational toys for everyone from the Smithsonian to Neiman Marcus,” she says. “We had no idea what we were doing, but we had a great time.” They sold Treehouse to the Strombecker Corporation, a west-side toy maker, in ’95, and Lindsay subsequently went to work for Thompson Target Media building a monitored Internet site for kids. In 2002 she and Carton recruited Sara Berliner, who’d interned at Treehouse, to help them launch a new company, Star Farm Productions. “Rick said he wanted to do entertainment,” Lindsay says, and “I knew we had to sell completed projects, not just ideas.”
“The aha moment for me was when I looked at Harry Potter,” Lindsay says. “I wanted to see where Harry Potter left money on the table.” She found it in the “millions of pieces of fan fiction the kids wrote on the Internet–all this elaborate backstory about Harry’s parents and about Hogwarts, all the stories that aren’t told in the books and movies. I said, Bingo! The future is storytelling in multiple media, and kids want to participate.” What happened next is as amazing as anything that unfolds in Nod’s Limbs.
Lyric Opera had a little problem when Hugh Smith, the scheduled lead for The Midsummer Marriage, which opens November 19, showed up for rehearsals a few weeks ago. According to Lyric, Smith, who’d been cast four years ago, “came fully prepared” and “singing wonderfully,” but his voice had “grown in size and heft and darkened in color.” General director William Mason, conductor Sir Andrew Davis, and Smith “mutually agreed that the role of Mark requires a different vocal aesthetic,” and Smith “requested to withdraw.” That sounds like Smith shook hands and walked away, but a week later Susan Elliott of MusicalAmerica.com reported that Smith was bought out of his contract for $98,000. According to the Tribune, Lyric spokesperson Magda Krance called the report incorrect; Elliott stands by her item. Smith has been replaced by Joseph Kaiser, conveniently available from the roster of young singers at the Lyric Opera Center. On top of that, director Sir Peter Hall withdrew from the production last week because of illness; he’ll be replaced by British choreographer Wayne McGregor.
