The year’s most unique theatrical experience? An immersive musical inside SickKids Hospital - Toronto Star

To launch a $2.5 billion fundraising campaign, the hospital skipped a banquet dinner in favour of an emotional theatrical experience. 

“The Patient's Tale,” one of the many anthology stories featured in “I See You,” features SickKids patient ambassador Leigha Hawksworth (left), puppeteer Alexandra Montagnese (centre) and actor Colin Doyle (right). 

Along the dimly lit corridors that snake through the legacy wing of the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) lie faint clues hinting at the activity that once filled these halls: a faded sticker of Mickey Mouse on one of the walls; wide double doors that swing open with ample room for a gurney; patient rooms that branch off from the main hallways like capillaries branching off from an artery.

For decades, this wing inside 555 University Ave. was at the centre of SickKids’ operations. Thousands of Toronto children and their families streamed into this building through its main entrance, past the life-sized statue of two women caring for their children. 

It’s hard to imagine that hive of activity today when looking at this old building from the sidewalk along Toronto’s Hospital Row. Much of SickKids’ patient-facing operations have been moved to the newer buildings along the east side of the hospital’s campus. Except for a few administrative offices and clinics, the corridors inside 555 University Ave. are mostly quiet.

But now, the building has found an improbable second life as the site of a new immersive theatre experience running through the end of November. It marks a first for SickKids: the institution, long in the business of caring for children, is now making a foray into show business.

Just don’t expect to see something along the lines of New York City’s “Sleep No More” or the immersive production of “Masquerade,” now running off-Broadway. The new show at SickKids still very much aligns with the hospital’s mission. It’s being presented, in fact, to launch a $2.5 billion fundraising campaign, the largest in the hospital’s history. 

Mickael (Kole Durnford) transports Siobhan (Amy Keating) and SickKids ambassador Layla as the pair enter a dream sequence in “The Siblings’ Tale,” one of the short stories in “I See You.” 

Co-written by Mitchell Cushman, Kristen Thomson, Rosamund Small and Tanja Jacobs, with original songs by Akiva Romer-Segal and Suzy Wilde, “I See You” is an anthology musical that features a series of independent tales, all inspired by true stories about the hospital’s patients, staff and families. 

“We want the world to know what a courageous thing the hospital is doing, and we wanted to tell it in a way that would have a lasting impact,” said Jennifer Bernard, president and CEO of the SickKids Foundation. “The theatre was the only way we could tell this story.”

Nico, played by Amaka Umeh, is one of the key characters in “I See You” and whose story bookends the immersive musical. 

The undertaking is enormous. Three Canadian theatre companies — Outside the March, the Musical Stage Company and Crow’s Theatre — are attached to the show. So too is Michael Rubinoff, the originating producer of the hit Canadian musical “Come From Away.” The show’s cast, meanwhile, features 16 adult actors, along with nine children who are all current or former SickKids patients. 

Physically, the production spans multiple floors of SickKids’ old hospital building, with the cast of adult and child performers guiding audiences through spaces that were formerly operating rooms, waiting rooms, research labs and patient rooms.

The 90-minute show is made up of six separate “tales.” All audiences see two main anthology stories, before breaking up into smaller groups that experience two of the four remaining tales. 

One tale is based on the true story of a SickKids patient named Ben, who lives with muscular dystrophy. Told by a cast of three human actors and a puppet, the story follows Leo, a young boy who takes on a superhero persona and refers to his treatment as “superhero treatment,” not necessarily as a way for him to cope, but to help protect his own parents. 

Legendary Leo, played by puppeteer Alexandra Montagnese, is beginning the slow process of recovery at the conclusion of “The Patient’s Tale,” which also features SickKids patient ambassador Leigha Hawksworth (left) and actor Colin Doyle.

“We met with Ben and his parents when we were doing research for this project, and there was something I just found very compelling about Ben’s journey,” said Cushman, who also co-directed the production with Jacobs. “A lot of the lines in the piece that are direct things that Ben said. So there’s just been so much life mirroring art in this.” 

Another story, set in a waiting room, highlights the burden that siblings of patients often bear. “In an early development meeting for the show, someone on the SickKids Foundation said, in an almost offhand way, that the sibling’s perspective was not something always focused on. And yet, illness often impacts a whole family,” said Jacobs. “So I become interested in the secret, quiet story about how a sibling might develop insomnia as a result of hypervigilance.”

Dr. Sonder, played by Alon Nashman, meets a childhood version of himself played by SickKids ambassador Caleb in “The Doctor’s Tale,” one of the stories in “I See You.” 

What makes the musical most moving, however, is the way in which it seamlessly blurs fiction and reality. The site-specific nature of the show adds a weighty reverence to the action. There are also nine patient ambassadors who guide audiences through the hospital and play versions of themselves in the show. Many spent years of their early lives at SickKids. All are intimately familiar with the hospital and its staff.

Leigha Hawksworth, now 17, was three years old when she was admitted to SickKids after doctors diagnosed her with Wilms tumour, a rare type of kidney cancer that primarily affects children. Following surgery to remove the tumour and right kidney, Hawksworth underwent 15 rounds of chemotherapy over 28 weeks before being declared cancer-free in 2012.

She still comes to SickKids for annual checkups and became a patient ambassador when she was 13, a role that sees her share her story and the work that the hospital does.

For Hawksworth, being part of “I See You” is a way for her to give back to the hospital community. “When people think of SickKids, they often only think of it as a children’s hospital. But it’s way more than that,” she said. “It’s a special place to me because at SickKids, there’s always a person who’s going to be there for you.” 

SickKids ambassador Leigha Hawksworth, 17, becomes a super hero at the beginning of “The Patient’s Tale,” one of the anthology stories featured in “I See You.” 

Hawksworth added that it was thanks to SickKids that she could attend Campfire Circle, a camp dedicated to children living with cancer and other serious illnesses. It’s there that she met some of her closest friends.

By live theatre standards, “I See You” came together remarkably quickly. The SickKids Foundation only began soliciting proposals from Toronto theatre companies earlier this year. The joint proposal pitched by Outside the March, the Musical Stage Company and Crow’s Theatre was only greenlit in June. 

The Golden Mother, played by Caitlyn MacInnis, waits for participants to arrive in the Department of Care portion of the SickKids immersive theatre experience. 

Work then began almost immediately. Bernard and her team found a construction company willing to donate its time to refurbishing the old wing of the hospital. Many of the spaces in the building had been sealed off for decades, frozen in time. Some patient rooms still had old beds in them. In the operating room was one of the hospital’s antiquated anaesthesia machines.

For Jacobs and the other co-creators, the first few weeks of the creative process involved getting to learn about the work being done at SickKids and the people behind it. “We got to work with the whole patient ambassador team here, meeting children, meeting families, hearing a whole range of stories,” she said. “Some of the stories in the piece are directly influenced by those conversations, while other stories are conflations of different people’s experiences.”

The idea of commissioning a musical came from the SickKids Foundation. Earlier this year, Bernard and her team were already planning to launch the hospital’s historic Heal the Future campaign, a record-breaking $2.5-billion fundraising drive that marked the largest paediatric health-care fundraising campaign in the world. The project aims to help SickKids introduce precision medicine, an approach that tailors care to a patient’s unique biology, genetics and environment to better diagnose, treat and predict serious illnesses.

Initially, Bernard and the Foundation were preparing to launch the campaign with a standard banquet dinner with donors. “But I just thought that the concept, impact and ambition of precision medicine required more than people standing on a stage trying to explain it to you,” she said. “And so, I did something that, in hindsight, was probably a little bit crazy. I said to my staff: ‘I’d like you to go back to the drawing board, and just think about something completely different.’”

Then, a few days later, her staff returned with a proposal for a theatre show. 

Co-creator and co-director Mitchell Cushman and producer Michael Rubinoff are pictured inside one of the performance spaces for “I See You.” 

In all, “I See You” will run for 22 performances. Most will be private — open only to SickKids donors, patients, staff and their families. But the hospital is holding a draw, offering members of the public the opportunity to win free tickets to a Nov. 20 performance. After the run concludes, many of the renovated rooms and immersive installations will remain open to SickKids staff and patients.

For those involved, there will also be many lessons that they’ll take with them long after the production ends. “Something that has been unexplored in our culture is the opportunity to bring artists into spaces that aren’t traditionally artistic spaces,” said Cushman. “Art can happen anywhere. It is for everyone. And creating something like this, in a functioning institution like SickKids, really underlines that.”

An audience member cries at the conclusion of “I See You.”

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Joshua Chong is a Toronto-based arts critic and culture reporter for the Star. Follow him on X: @joshualdwchong.