“Downton Abbey” actor Elizabeth McGovern will headline the 2025-26 Off-Mirvish season, which will feature a lineup of five productions, the most in the subscription program’s history.
The Academy Award nominee is set to star in her own play, “Ava: The Secret Conversations,” in which she’ll portray its title character, the Golden Age film star Ava Gardner. Based on a series of real-life interviews that the British journalist Peter Evans conducted with Gardner, the biographical drama comes to Toronto in November following runs in London and Los Angeles.
McGovern’s play is the second show in the Off-Mirvish season, which kicks off in September with a new Canadian production of “Bright Star,” by the American comedian Steve Martin and Edie Brickell. The bluegrass-infused musical, which played on Broadway in 2016, follows a literary editor whose chance encounter with a young soldier, returning from the Second World War, forces her to revisit her past.
This upcoming run, directed by Jacob Wolstencroft, will be a co-production between Mirvish and Garner Theatre Productions, a company that specializes in actor-musician shows, with performers who also play their own instruments.
Producer David Mirvish said the new Off-Mirvish lineup will be “even more ambitious” than the company’s more commercial mainstage season, previously announced in February. All productions will run at Mirvish’s 700-seat CAA Theatre.
“These are shows that come from many different places — all the way from a Broadway musical to a small London play,” he said in a phone interview with the Star.
In December, Mirvish will present the British ghost thriller “The Woman in Black,” which was a West End mainstay for more than three decades, making it one of the longest-running nonmusical shows in London’s history. The production set to play in Toronto is currently touring the U.K. and features Robin Herford’s original direction.
The second musical of the season will be the previously reported Canadian premiere of “Kimberly Akimbo,” running from January to February 2026. Winner of the Tony Award for best musical in 2023, this new staging is to star the Canadian stage icon Louise Pitre as the title character, a teenage girl who’s diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder that makes her age faster than her peers. Robert McQueen, who previously helmed the critically acclaimed Off-Mirvish production of “Fun Home,” will direct.
The season will conclude in the spring of 2026 with Virginia Gay’s “Cyrano,” a gender-bent retelling of Edmond Rostand’s classic play “Cyrano de Bergerac.” This presentation marks the play’s North American premiere and follows a run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last summer.
