Everyone’s got a family secret. When Toronto artist Noam Tomaschoff found out his, he made a musical out of it. At 31, he decided to take a DNA test for fun. When he told his parents, Sylvie and Gideon, they started acting strange — and then eventually broke the news that Gideon is not his biological father. The couple used an anonymous sperm donor after facing some fertility issues, but kept the decision a secret from almost everyone in their lives, including, up until that day, their child.
Tomaschoff says his immediate reaction was to start telling everyone. “Almost subconsciously, the thought was if I can make something out of this and harness it and put it into the story of my life, then it’s going to make sense.”
That story of his life — including the eventual discovery of 35 half-siblings from the same anonymous donor — turned into a one-man show that is arriving back at home at Mirvish this month after touring all over the world. Our Little Secret: A True New Musical premieres at CAA Theatre on Nov. 3. We caught up with Tomaschoff to learn more about this shockingly true story and what audiences can expect from the show.
What was your initial reaction to the big reveal?
The first step was, “I need to talk about this.” I didn’t know how I felt about it, but I just needed to say it out loud while it was happening. And the audience for that was the group chat of my best friends from high school. Everything that happened in those first few months was just pulled straight into the group chat — and this show is that. The audience is the group chat. We’re hearing everything as it happens chronologically.
When did this group chat-turned-show turn into something real for you?
The minute Our Little Secret became real was when I entered the Toronto Fringe lottery, which is just a pure lottery to get a space in July. Okay. Once I got that space before having written anything, I knew it was going to happen in July. So then we had a deadline.
How did your parents feel about you making this secret into a musical?
Gideon: When we first told him how he came into this world, I had hoped that it would stay between us. And then there was a period of further discoveries on his part, and there was kind of a tension there because we couldn’t contribute to that. We didn’t have any additional information; the donor was unknown to us.
Noam: When they told me, I had to leave the day after for a wedding, and then I went back to California, where I was living at the time. So we weren’t in the same place, and that’s where my 23andMe test was waiting in the mail. I had sent it away, and it takes them two months to process, so that’s two months of me refreshing the page, and just waiting.
Gideon: Two months later he calls us, and he sounds so excited; his voice is completely different from the past two months. He told us he’s finding siblings and family members through the DNA test. Then he called to say he had a show booked for July. Right until that moment, we hadn’t told anybody about this in 32 years. So my first reaction was, “Does it have to be in Toronto?” But we knew we had to support him, so we decided we had to start telling people.
Sylvie: As a parent, you’re worried. People go off the deep end on things like that. It was very anxiety-provoking. But in a way, he had previously stepped away from music and singing and everything [Noam graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, founded New York’s Shakespeare in the Square and has performed on national musical theatre tours with TheatreWorks USA] so there was kind of this good feeling of, in this awkward and bizarre way, we were instrumental in bringing them back into his life.
What was the process of finally telling people like?
Gideon: At first it was really tough. We actually called people and told them we want to come to their house. Everybody was wondering, “What’s going on?” We were exhausted just telling people, but they actually were tremendous. People were very supportive. Then we started just calling people, and slowly it started getting easier to tell people, and we actually became accustomed to talking about it.
The part that Noam forgot to mention is that everything to do with the show, we were kept in the dark. Overnight, it seemed like all his friends and family were singing his songs in the car, but we knew zero.
Noam, tell me more about the format of the show.
It’s just me onstage. It’s mostly told through different musical numbers based on crucial moments along the story, up until present day, mostly from my point of view. But I also play my parents, and a few other characters.
Why did a musical make sense for the show?
Taking those big moments and focusing on them as individual songs really worked because the music — with the tone of it, the speed, the style — it conveys exactly how it felt at the time for me. And with rhymes, you’re able to amplify and condense what you’re feeling at the time, so the audience is like, “Oh, I feel that too.” That’s really my goal. I want the audience to feel how I felt at the time.
And it sounds like the DNA test plays a big role in this story.
Actually, after the Toronto Fringe, I travelled to the 23andMe [the genetic test he took] headquarters in San Francisco and did the show for all 400 employees in the lunch room!
When did you first perform Our Little Secret?
At my old apartment. My building had a movie theatre with a screen that never worked, so nobody used it. But there was a little seating area, so I invited my friends and I did it for them. And the format then was really just me and a table that I brought from my apartment. And that’s how it was when I performed it at Toronto Fringe and at Edinburgh Fringe.
This show has already travelled all over the world. What were those experiences like?
Ryan Peters, the composer, Russell Citron, the producer, and I really did a ton of work along with my parents to get people into the theatre for Toronto Fringe, and they did come, so it was a really great communal experience. But the following summer when we went to Edinburgh Fringe, you have no real sense of community there. There was a lot more, shall we say, constructive feedback. That’s ultimately why we went out there, because we’re going to have some Scottish guy who really is not going to relate to yeah what you’re saying as a North American, and he’s going to give you a bunch of notes through the public format of a review.
Sylvie: At the Toronto Fringe, there are maybe 100 shows. At Edinburgh, there are maybe 10,000. The competition is fierce. So even though we really don’t want to tell the world our little secret, we wanted to promote the show. So we had to go around with flyers and lure people in.
Gideon: We told people, “This is our son’s show. He’s doing a show about us.”
Sylvie: Gideon said that to get an audience, we had to tell them the story. So he would sit next to people in the beer hall and say, “For 32 years, I lied to my son.”
Noam: Incidentally, John Karastamis, who is the director of programming at Mirvish, came to the Toronto Fringe and saw our show then. And he sent us a massive email like, “This is promising, here are 50 notes.” And that has been kind of the foundational document of all our development since then.
What has it been like building up Our Little Secret for Mirvish?
It’s not starting from scratch, but the show definitely has a good amount of new material and tweaks. We wanted to have the scenes and everything feel as natural and easy to watch as possible, so working with the director was really all about that. And that’s Adam Pascal, who famously played Roger in Rent and has three decades of experience onBroadway and similar stages. So the workflow was that I would do a scene and then he would just have the right instinct of how to make that scene feel right based on those years of experience. That was a really complementary thing because I don’t have that experience.
How do you deal with reliving this whole real experience every night on stage?
It’s much more of like a standard performer’s mindset. You have to go to the well. This is the only way to do the show, and the well is how it was then. The only way to do the show is by putting yourself back there. Otherwise, you’re not in the moment. It doesn’t become less intense in the past.
Gideon: It’s been almost three and a half, four years since we told Noam. Life progresses, and relating to this whole story evolves. We’re still living it, but time does its thing, right? However, the show doesn’t. The show evolves on a different scale, but it’s still trying to capture those initial moments. The story is out, and we don’t attempt to control it anymore. But it’s a very deeply first personal story for the three of us. And sometimes we have to remind ourselves that this is it’s not just a story. It’s real life.