What to know
- Performing artist Amaka Umeh, an award-winning performer of Igbo and Ikwerre descent, opens up about their career and stepping into the role of the Witch in Bad Hats’ Narnia.
- Though initially unfamiliar with the C.S. Lewis’ original story of The Chronicles of Narnia, Umeh embraced the challenge of reinventing the Witch and exploring the mythology of the role.
- The rehearsal process for Bad Hats’ Narnia combined music, harmonies, movement, and ensemble collaboration, fostering both creative discovery and transcendent experiences.
- Umeh hopes audiences, especially children, will leave the theatre inspired, carrying messages of wonder, joy, and the power of imagination.
- Bad Hats’ Narnia runs at Soulpepper’s Young Centre for the Performing Arts from Nov. 18 to Dec. 28, 2025.
When Amaka Umeh first learned they would be cast as the Witch in Bad Hats’ Narnia, they were, as always, excited to join and work alongside the talented crew. But returning to musical performances like this retelling of C.S. Lewis’ mystifying tale has brought the performing artist back to something intuitively known, the essence of joy.
The Toronto-based performer is no stranger to the stage. Their desire to sharpen their storytelling skills, and interest in offering narratives that challenge and inspire their audiences, continue to draw them to the craft. It is a gift returned to the community through the benedictions of theatre.
“It’s really been the most unexpected and welcome blessing how all of this has gone in my career over the past few years. I really still enjoy watching theatre because, I mean this as a compliment, but there is something really primitive about gathering, you know, to hear a story be told, and seeing people stretch their imagination beyond what is really happening directly in front of them,” Umeh told Now Toronto.
A JOURNEY THROUGH STAGE AND STORY
Umeh’s theatrical journey has been anything but merely conventional. An award-winning performing artist of Igbo and Ikwerre (Nigerian) descent, they have explored a robust range of possibilities through imaginative and transformative characters, and have committed to reviving forgotten narratives and voices unheard.
With credits in Three Sisters, Death and the King’s Horseman, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, Fall on Your Knees, The Wolves, and The Strangers’ Case, Umeh’s artistic path is one defined by growth, exploration, reinvention, and transcendence.
But the performer sees the course of their career as something built through them, rather than something formed by them alone.
“For me, it’s really been the most unexpected and welcome blessing how all of this has gone in my career over the past few years…it feels wrong to say that I’ve built a career, because really, it’s kind of been built with me, and almost for me, by the network, by the industry, the community of people who say my name in spaces.”
FROM DISCONNECTION TO INTERCONNECTION TO REINVENTION
Although the story of the Chronicles of Narnia was familiar, Umeh had little personal connection to the long-held tale. It was not until the year before that they watched the film for the first time, sitting down with a friend to see what the world of Narnia, and later Bad Hats, was all about.
“We talked about, what is your relationship to this story? And I was basically like, ‘I have none…’ I find myself in this situation a bit, where it’s like, you play this iconic, you know, storied history character that everybody knows really, really well, and you never thought that you ever would be in this position.”
Umeh met the novel challenges of stepping into Bad Hats’ Narnia with curiosity, recognizing an opportunity to reinvent the character of the Witch — a calling that once felt daunting — and explore the mythology behind the role, draw on their unique personal history and fascination with the supernatural.
“Having grown up in a Christian household, all of my relationship to witches was like, ‘don’t go there.’ I was kind of interested to figure out, well, what is really wrong with what witches are doing?”
“Who are they?”
Umeh likens aspects of the Witch’s experience to their own experience living as a Black person, and more broadly, as a human being, which they say carries an expectation of goodness, proper behaviour, and appropriate comportment — a lifelong teaching of how to be good, and a heavier carriage of who you are expected to be.
“There are some people who are automatically awarded this sort of goodness. Who are, you know, yeah, intrinsically seen that way. And there are people who have to work hard to circumvent what seems like their inherent badness.”
“I’m fascinated by this figure who has cultivated power, who is a descendant of these women who were wronged, who has cultivated a sense of authority, and who has honed a craft, right, like who’s become quite good at what she does, and who unfortunately now stands to recreate the same ways that she was taught power operates.”
Taking on this role has led Umeh to a distinctive push and pull as they reflect on their potential participation in perpetuating oppression. They say they remain mindful of the ways they might lean into structures that oppress them, both those similar to and different from themselves, and others who are also operating under similar conditions.
“We’re all struggling with it, whether we know it or not.”
SHAPING A SHARED STORY
For Umeh, one of the major keys in human evolution is our collective ability to imagine, to see beyond what we consider play and reality. Theatre, they believe, offers an avenue for catharsis and expression, guiding us along a route toward the understanding that we are not alone.
“Receiving a piece of art is a way to be invited to the possibility that our experience is, yes, they’re singular and they’re unique and individual, yet they’re also universal.”
But receiving a role carries more weight than delivering a standout performance alone. For Umeh, being the person for the role, or a connective conduit for the production’s message, fuels their passion for the stage, for performance, and for working alongside ensemble-driven theatres like Bad Hats.
Discovering and cementing their relationship with instrumentation, singing harmonies, playing within different time signatures, and discovering forms of movement were all part of the creative and collaborative process for the Bad Hats’ Narnia production, but something more transcendent stayed with Umeh throughout.
“It really feels like a global experience, not just because we are such a diverse sort of demographic represented there on stage, but like music in particular, is something that transcends; culture, that transcends difference.”
“Music and movement, I find them to be such unifying languages.”
A CALL TO ALL: INVITE WONDER AND JOY
Younger hearts and minds see things differently, Umeh says. They remain connected to simplicity, innocence, inherent goodness, and the way things ought to be — a space of peace before society has the opportunity to decide whether their innate qualities make them good or bad, they add.
As a result, their performance, which to some may appear as merely singing and dancing, centres the children who will inherit the messages they share through their character and presence on stage, and considers how they might impact the next generation of performers, storytellers, and magicians.
“It’s a very serious job, actually…I’ve done this for a while now, and I’m an elder in this, so what am I? What could I possibly be setting up for new generations?”
But it is our inclination toward enjoying life, basking in the humble power of our creativity, our propensity toward positivity, living in harmony, and play — when we imagine beyond our present circumstances — that is where magic lives, begins, and thrives; something Umeh hopes audiences will carry with them when the retelling of Narnia ends and Bad Hats’ curtains close.
“The more I embrace it and look around for it, there’s magic everywhere. It’s everywhere. It’s in everything.”
The Toronto premiere of Bad Hats’ Narnia — an original holiday musical for everyone ages six to 106 and beyond — will take Soulpepper’s Young Centre for the Performing Arts stage from Nov. 18 to Dec. 28, 2025.
To learn more about the production and to purchase tickets, visit the Soulpepper website.
