North American Premiere of Virginia Gay’s CYRANO - Tickets on sale November 3
For Immediate Release
Media Contact: John Karastamatis, Sue Toth, Erin Nantais – Mirvish Productions
STARRING
ERYN-JEAN NORVILL AS CYRANO
CAA THEATRE • MARCH 14 – APRIL 5, 2026
TICKETS ON SALE NOVEMBER 3
Virginia Gay’s CYRANO, the critically acclaimed and joyous gender-flipped retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac will make its highly anticipated North American Premiere at Toronto’s CAA Theatre from March 14 to April 5, 2026.
Tickets will be available at 10AM on Monday November 3 at mirvish.com or by calling 1.800.461.3333.
ABOUT CYRANO
Scooping a prestigious Fringe First award at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe, where it had a sold-out run, this reimaging of the Edmond Rostand classic is a big-hearted, irreverent rom-com for our times packed with music, wit and aching romance. It is a love letter to hope, to overcoming loneliness, to language and desire; to the irrepressible magic of theatre.
Cyrano is the most interesting person in any room – a wordsmith, a charmer. She works twice as hard and runs twice as fast as the pretty boys, because she’s deeply ashamed of something about herself. Enter Roxanne: brilliant and beautiful, with a penchant for poetry and a way with words, just like Cyrano. But Roxanne only has eyes for Yan: hot, manly Yan; who is dumbstruck around Roxanne. Probably shy, right? Until suddenly he starts saying the most amazing things. But it’s not Yan writing these perfect love scenes, it’s Cyrano ...
★★★★★ “A giddy, sensitive celebration of love… What a treat.” - The Times
★★★★★ “Enormously uplifting and infectiously sweet. This is theatre at its most happy-making. A total treat.” - The Stage
★★★★★ “Dazzlingly clever… witty, knowing, satirical and heartfelt all at once” - Financial Times
THE CAST
In the titular role is Eryn-Jean Norvill, one of Australia’s leading theatre performers and creators. She premiered Kip Wiliams’ international hit The Picture of Dorian Gray for the Sydney Theatre Company. From London's West End are Madeline Charlemagne as Roxanne, and George Ioannides as Yan. The cast is completed by Mona Goodwin, David Tarkenter and Mackenzie Gilbert.
ERYN-JEAN NORVILL is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts (Australia) and has undertaken further training at L’École Philippe Gaulier (France) and The Groundlings School (Los Angeles). She has worked extensively in professional theatre both in Australia and internationally.
Selected theatre credits include: The Blue Notebooks (Max Richter World Tour), The Confessions (A Zeldin Company/International Co-production), The Picture of Dorian Gray, Three Sisters, All My Sons, King Lear, Suddenly Last Summer, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Romeo and Juliet (Sydney Theatre Company); Melancholia (Malthouse Theatre); The Government Inspector (Malthouse & Belvoir St Theatre); Hamlet and Top Girls (Melbourne Theatre Company); The Boys (Griffin Theatre Company); Fidelio (West Australian Symphony Orchestra); Anthem (Arts Centre Melbourne & Performing Lines); and Chekhov Re:Cut Platonov (The Hayloft Project); A Picture of Bright Lights (Darlinghurst Playwright Theatre Company); and A Man for All Seasons (Complete Works Theatre Company).
Eryn Jean has received multiple awards for her acclaimed performance in The Picture of Dorian Gray, including the 2023 Green Room Award for Outstanding Performance in a Mainstage Production and the 2022 Sydney Theatre Award for Best Performance in a Leading Role in a Mainstage Production. She was also the recipient of the 2022 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award. Previous awards include the 2015 Sydney Theatre Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Suddenly Last Summer), the 2012 Sydney Theatre Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role (The Boys), the 2012 Green Room Award for Best Female Actor (Top Girls), and the 2009 Melbourne Fringe Festival People’s Choice Award (A Tiny Chorus).
As a writer and theatre-maker, Eryn Jean has co-created numerous works, including A Tiny Chorus and Niche (Elbow Room Productions). As dramaturg, her credits include The Picture of Dorian Gray and Lord of the Flies (Sydney Theatre Company).
Selected television credits include The Twelve (Foxtel/Binge/ITVX), It’s Fine, I’m Fine (SBS), Love Me (Acorn UK/Foxtel/Binge), Preppers (ABC), Death Star PR and Home and Away.
Eryn Jean is a co-founder of Safe Theatres Australia, an organization dedicated to fostering sustainable, inclusive practices and positive cultural change within the arts industry. She is a proud member of Equity and the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA).
MADELINE CHARLEMAGNE trained at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.THEATRE INCLUDES: The Harder They Come (Theatre Royal, Stratford East); Hadestown (Lyric Theatre, West End); The Secret Life of Bees (Almeida Theatre); 42 Balloons (Vaudeville Theatre), Kick (Lyric Hammersmith Theatre), Hex (National Theatre), Carousel (Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park). Workshops: Chasing the Rainbow – The Road to Oz; Tristan (Birmingham Hippodrome); Love Can (The Other Palace).
GEORGE IOANNIDES’ THEATRE INCLUDES: Guys and Dolls (Bridge Theatre); Follies (Tangier, Morocco), On Your Feet! (Curve Leicester, London Coliseum, UK tour); An Office and a Gentleman (Curve Leicester, UK tour); Annie (Piccadilly Theatre); Grease (World Trade Centre, Dubai); Mamma Mia! (Novello Theatre). TV INCLUDES: The Secret of the Butterfly (S.P.A.F. Arts & Films)
MONA GOODWIN’S THEATRE INCLUDES: Lifers (Southwark Playhouse); Grenfell: in the Words of the Survivors and The Visit (National Theatre); Misfits (Queens Theatre Hornchurch); Napoli Brooklyn (Park Theatre); War of the Worlds (New Diorama); Brilliant Jerks (Vault Festival); Ross and Rachel (UK tour); Blue Heart (Orange Tree); Laila the Musical (Watford Palace); The Snow Queen (Royal & Derngate); Finding Noor (Citizens); Where Have I Been All My Life (New Vic); Cling to Me Like Ivy (Birmingham Rep); and Spring Awakening (Lyric Hammersmith and West End).TV INCLUDES: The Cage; Can You Keep a Secret; Extraordinary; Sex Education; Capital and Black Mirror. FILM INCLUDES: Ali and Ava, Marvellous and Brighton Rock.
DAVID TARKENTER’s THEATRE INCLUDES: Cyrano (Edinburgh Fringe Festival/ Park Theatre, London); The Motive and the Cue, The Red Barn (The National Theatre); Girl from the North Country, The 47th, Endgame (The Old Vic); The Four Quartets (Theatre Royal Bath); One man version of The Call of the Wild (Greenwich and Lewisham Young People’s Theatre); Hamlet (World Tour); The Inn At Lydda, The Knight Of The Burning Pestle (Shakespeare’s Globe); The Canterbury Tales (Creation Theatre); Arsenic And Old Lace, Absent Friends, The Winter’s Tale, The Rivals, Grapes Of Wrath, King David Man Of Blood, Under Milk Wood, The Lonesome West, David Copperfield, Of Mice And Men, Two, She Stoops To Conquer, Coriolanus, Death Of A Salesman, The Resistable Rise Of Arturo Ui, Twelfth Night, To Kill A Mockingbird (Mercury Theatre, Colchester); Betrayal, The Collection, Hamlet, All My Sons, The Last Yankee (Rapture Theatre); Oh, Starry Night and Pantomime (Lakeside Theatre, Colchester); Treasure Island (Northern Broadsides); Our Country’s Good, The Recruiting Officer, Frozen, The Birthday Party, The Deep Blue Sea, Kiss of The Spiderwoman, Season’s Greetings, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Theatre by the Lake, Keswick); The Best Man (UK Tour/ West End) and over 20 productions for NTC Touring Theatre Company. TV INCLUDES: I Fought the Law; Everything I Know About Love; 55 Degrees North; Falling; Lawless; Byker Grove; Micawber and Heartbeat. FILM INCLUDES: County Lines, London Road and Petit Ange. RADIO INCLUDES: Little Dorrit (Radio 4).
MACKENZIE GILBERT is from Co. Limerick, Ireland with roots in New Orleans. She graduated from ArtsEd in 2024 and is now based in south London. Mackenzie is thrilled to be making her professional debut in this production. This will be her first time in Toronto, and she wants to try all the food!
THE CREATIVE TEAM
The creative team includes Virginia Gay (Writer), Clare Watson (Director), Amanda Stoodley (Set & Costume Designer), Andy Purves (Lighting Designer), Naomi Downham (Casting Director), and is produced by Roast Productions.
VIRGINIA GAY graduated WAAPA, then spent four years pretending to be a nurse on All Saints, six months pretending to be Julia Gillard in the STC’s Wharf Revue, and five years on Winners & Losers, where she pretended to know a lot about high finance. That last one, particularly, was a stretch.
She won a Sydney Theatre Award for Best Actress for Calamity Jane and was nominated for a Most Outstanding Actress Logie for playing Magda Szubanski’s wife on After the Verdict (Channel 9). She starred in the film Judy & Punch (also starring Mia Wasikowska) which premiered at Sundance, in Savage River (dir. Jocelyn Moorehouse) for Aquarius Films (ABC, Paramount+), which also starred Katherine Langford, and Safe Home (SBS and Imogen Banks), also starring Aisha Dee. She wrote and directed her short film Paper Cut, which made 2018 Tropfest finals, and in 2024/25 she is thrilled to be the Artistic Director of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, the biggest and most prestigious cabaret festival in the world.
In 2020 she wrote two new plays: an adaptation of Cyrano for Melbourne Theatre Centre, which sold out its triumphant 2022 run and toured to the Perth Festival in 2023, and The Boomkak Panto for Belvoir, which was a smash hit for Christmas 2021. She starred in both and she codirected The Boomkak Panto.
She’s been an apocalyptic squid in Eddie Perfect’s Vivid White, a prize bitch in The Beast, every stop on the bogan-to-hipster spectrum in On the Production of Monsters, and Nancy Hayes’ granddaughter in Minnie and Liraz, all for the MTC. She played pacifist, suffragist, and feminist Vida Goldstein in The War That Changed Us (ABC), and a fast-talking 1930s photographer in High Society (Hayes Theatre Company). She had a sold-out season at the Opera House of Cautionary Tales for Children (Arena Theatre Company), and was Bea Miles, iconic (and homeless) Sydney eccentric, in the immersive-theatre experience Hidden Sydney.
She has written two solo cabaret shows, Songs to Self-Destruct to and Dirty Pretty Songs, both of which sold out at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, and which toured nationally and internationally, most notably headlining the Famous Spiegeltent at the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe. She also hosted cultural phenomenon La Clique in Leicester Square in Christmas 2019.
She makes regular appearances on Thank God You’re Here, Mark Humphries’ sketches for 7:30 (ABC), The Book Club (ABC), Adam Hills’ In Gordon Street Tonight (ABC), Good News Week (Channel 10), Studio at The Memo (Foxtel), The Unbelievable Truth (Channel 7), was team captain for CRAM! (Channel 10). She was a grand finalist in 2023’s Dancing with the Stars and appears in a series of increasingly unhinged cameos on Channel 7’s sketch show, We Interrupt This Broadcast.
CLARE WATSON is a former Artistic Director and Co-CEO of Black Swan. For the company (2016-2022), Clare directed Barracking for the Umpire (2022 season), The Glass Menagerie, York, The Cherry Orchard, The Torrents (a co-production with Sydney Theatre Company), Our Town, Xenides, The Events, You Know We Belong Together (a co-production with Perth Festival and DAADA over two seasons, including UK tour to London’s Southbank, Edinburgh International Festival and Sydney Opera House) and Let the Right One In. She is currently Artistic Director of Windmill Theatre Company and has directed the world premiere of Hans and Gret for the 2023 Adelaide Festival. Previously, Clare was Artistic Director at St Martins collaborating with children and teenagers, female Director-in-Residence at Malthouse Theatre, and an MTC Women Directors’ Program alumna. Clare is a graduate of Directing at the Victorian College of the Arts. She is a trained teacher, working in high schools in Victoria for 15 years and was also the Education Manager at Malthouse Theatre. She is a recipient of the 2021 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award, praised for creative leadership, generosity and contribution to the community.
ROAST PRODUCTIONS
Roast is a live entertainment company founded by Bonnie Royal and Michael Stevens, based in London and working internationally, focusing particularly on theatre, concerts and family entertainment, as well as offering general management and marketing consultancy services in the West End and beyond.
Recent projects include Duck Pond (Southbank, London), Virginia Gay’s Cyrano (Traverse Theatre; Park Theatre), The Seagull starring Cate Blanchett (Barbican Theatre, London), an Australian tour of Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible is Going to Happen; Standing at the Sky’s Edge in partnership with the National Theatre and Various Productions (Gillian Lynne Theatre, West End), Vanya starring Andrew Scott (Duke of York’s Theatre, West End; Lortel Theatre, NYC), 2:22 A Ghost Story (Apollo Theatre, West End; Australia; and UK tour), Macbeth starring Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma (Liverpool; Edinburgh; London; and Washington DC), Tyrell Williams’ Red Pitch (@sohoplace, West End), Christmas
Actually curated by Richard Curtis (Southbank Centre, London), The 13-Storey Treehouse
(UK tour) and the inaugural Wimbledon Children’s Festival (New Wimbledon Theatre).
Upcoming projects include Kinky Boots (London Coliseum, West End), Dog Man – The Musical (London and UK tour), Public The Musical (Leicester Curve), and The 27 Club by Anthony McCarten (in development).