If your five-minute musical flops, Matt Pilipiak will back you. “This is just five to seven minutes that’s going to happen one time at a concert,” he smiles, “and if it sucks, that’s okay! It’ll still be great.”
It’s an unusual pitch from Bad Hats Theatre, a company that has garnered 15 Dora Mavor Moore Awards and reached more than 110,000 audience members. Many of us have watched Pilipiak, who is the Artistic Managing Director, in those productions: as the harried White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, or a gloriously fussy Mr Smee in Peter Pan, or the conflicted Mr Tumnus/Mr B in last season’s Narnia. Offstage, talking Bad Hats theatre, he is equally delightful … and also plenty strategic.
Finding new bad ideas
On Sunday, October 25, he and Artistic Director Fiona Sauder present the second New Bad Ideas Live at The Great Hall. It’s a concert that has grown out of the New Bad Ideas program, launched in 2018 as Bad Hats’ own platform expanded.
“We were building stuff in house and writing our own shows, but as we grew the company, we couldn’t build everything in house and also run the company,” Pilipiak explains. The program now supports new Canadian musicals that have a broad, all-ages appeal. It is “decidedly different from TYA” or Theatre for Young Audiences, he says, but wide enough to fill a room with a diverse, intergenerational audience. By the company’s count, it has backed more than 38 creators on 20 new works. More than 75 per cent of those projects have gone on to further development or production.
With so many original songs to handle, the team decided to stage a concert of hits and sneak peeks last year. This year, the evening repeats an experiment that is at the heart of this enterprise. Four writers and four composers have been paired up and asked for a five-to-eight-minute mini-musical. “We arranged their marriage,” Pilipiak grins, “and we gave them a prompt, and said, ‘Make us a five-minute mini-musical.'” The prompt is disarmingly simple: each duo receives one of the four cardinal directions: north, east, south or west.
The pairings are a who’s who of Canadian music theatre: Makram Ayache with Anton Lipovetsky (North), Rosamund Small with Suzy Wilde (East), Marie Farsi with Kevin Wong (South), and Nam Nguyen with Wilfred Moeschter of A Perfect Bowl of Pho, (West). The musicals had been crafted and rehearsals were about to begin when I spoke with Pilipiak — and he was feeling greedy. “I just want more of them!” he laughed. “It’s been fun to see how each of them interpreted their cardinal direction and infused it into their piece. Some are quite obvious, and some are a bit more subtle.”
Taking risks … and not rushing development
The apparent low stakes are deliberate. Commissions from big theatres tend to push artists toward what they already know, because risk is expensive. Here, risk is the point. “We want it to be an incubator for first ideas,” he notes, “things you might feel too scared to try if it were a bigger ask, or a more important thing.”
Two of last year’s mini-musical commissions are already growing. Camp, by Ben Kopp and Margot Grieve, began as a five-minute idea at the 2025 concert and grew into a sold-out Toronto Fringe hit this summer, and its creators are now looking at where else it might live. The Hyacinthia, by Mark Crawford and Kevin Wong, also debuted at last year’s concert. It reimagines the Greek myth of Hyacinthus, which Pilipiak calls “this beautiful and queer myth,” with Wong’s pop sensibilities in the score. Their piece ran longer than the brief, and the pair are now expanding it into a full musical with support from other organizations. Bad Hats will hold a workshop with them in February 2027. Not every seed becomes a tree, and Pilipiak is cheerfully fine with that. He recalls one piece by Fiona Sauder and Ahmed Moneka was so complete that he told them “this is an amazing story, but what it really wants to be is a short children’s book.”
Beyond the mini musicals, the evening offers glimpses of other works-in-progress. Pilipiak’s timeline for the staging of these works is unhurried. “We really believe in letting shows take the time they need to get to the stage.” The benefit of such thoughtful incubation is that Bad Hats builds for longevity. Peter Pan ran annually from 2015 to 2019 before going on to licensed productions across the country, while Alice toured Ontario, travelled to Winnipeg, and even went digital during the pandemic.
Mining old stories
“We want to feel really confident that we’re not rushing it,” Pilipiak offers – and with that ethos in mind, audiences can expect Piper, Kat Sandler and Adam Sakiyama’s take on The Pied Piper of Hamelin — most likely in Toronto, in 2027. The Nutcracker, by Sauder and Britta Johnson; and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, by Gregory Prest and Landon Doak, are likely to follow in 2028… ideally alongside a tour of last Christmas’s Narnia from Soulpepper.
Old stories are Bad Hats’ bread and butter, Pilipiak notes, along with the questions they invite: “Why are we so drawn to these stories? What can we let go of? What makes them resonate for an audience now?” The company keeps a running list of old story candidates, and yes, they do take requests. Narnia began as a commission from Manitoba Theatre for Young People, and The Nutcracker was also someone else’s idea. (Pilipiak is delighted to note that Tchaikovsky’s music is in the public domain, free to be played with and interpolated.)
But some beloved books remain out of reach, at least for now. For instance, E.B. White’s perennial favourite Charlotte’s Web will not enter the public domain in Canada until 2056 because here, copyright runs for the author’s life, plus 70 years. “We’ve done work in the public domain, so we don’t have to worry about a rights acquisition,” Pilipiak says … before admitting just how much he loves White’s book. “We’re not opposed to one. It’s just a step we haven’t taken. And we’ve been so rich in public domain stories that we haven’t had to.”
Entering L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle
The concert also previews works from this year’s concert program, including The Best Friend Blanket Fort Show, GIGS, and The Blue Castle, Saleema Nawaz and Scott Christian’s adaptation of L.M. Montgomery’s 1926 novel, which turns 100 this year, and is her only book set in Ontario.
The idea for a musical adaptation of The Blue Castle came from the writers, not the company. They applied to the program with the project already underway, and pitched it as a fit for Bad Hats. Pilipiak, a fan of Anne of Green Gables, didn’t know the book. He was stunned by it, and told them, “You’re so smart for thinking of this source material. This whole time, this has just been there.” He finds the story “so potent still”, with an exciting female protagonist whom he wants to watch go on her journey. Since the first quarter of the year, the team has been shaping the show: “It was already such a great script, and the music is so gorgeous,” he enthuses. “They’ve taken our suggestions so wonderfully. It’s made leaps and bounds in its short time with us.”
A workshop is planned for the end of the year, and he sees a 2028 premiere as possible. But the show belongs to its creators. “We don’t own those pieces,” he says. Timing is “a question for Saleema and Scott, as much as it is for me. But I would love to see that one on stage sooner than later.”
Finding the lessons — and the people to land them
What ties it all together is a philosophy of layers. Pilipiak affirms that Theatre for Young Audiences is “super important,” but notes that it “can be quite didactic” if it is built around a curriculum-based lesson. Bad Hats aims for something else. “If there’s a lesson in our shows,” he says, “it’s actually to remind the adults of something the kids already know.”
Take Charlotte’s Web, which came up in our conversation. It speaks to the meaningfulness of a life, sacrifice, and what parenthood can look like in different forms. “A child isn’t going to pick up on that,” Pilipiak says, “but the story still will resonate with them and stick with them.” They may remember the action at the fair or the vivid creepiness of Templeton the rat. But “when they return to that story as an adult, they will have remembered their childhood love for it, and see the profound message that exists in it now.” This, he says, is what Peter Pan, Alice and Narnia share: “childhood wonderment” for kids, and “something really deep and meaningful for an adult who’s returning to that story years later.”
This year’s Bad New Ideas features eight returning performers: Astrid Van Wieren (Aslan in Narnia), Shakura Dixon (the Red Queen in Alice), Justin Eddy, Emry Harland, George Krissa, Kyle Brown, Elysia Cruz and Ride the Cyclone alumna Rielle Braid – along with Ben Kopp, last year’s mini commissioner, as music director. Bad Hats tries to “avoid working with artists just once,” preferring instead to “continue to foster them,” Pilipiak smiles.
‘”We find our people and work with them over and over again” … but not in New Bad Ideas Live 2026. This show plays for just one magical night: Sunday, October 25 at 7 p.m., at The Great Hall, 1087 Queen Street W., Toronto. Tickets are available at badhatstheatre.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
