Our Little Secret: The 23&Me Musical

Photo by Zach Terry

By: Angela Guardiani

The Toronto Fringe Festival is back in all its beautiful, messy, enthusiastic creative energy. What a joy! Here’s the second of two Fringe reviews for shows seen within a 24-hour window. We’re finishing with Our Little Secret: The 23&Me Musical.

Have you ever known that you were witnessing something that was destined to get real big, real fast? There have definitely been Toronto Fringe shows like that; The Drowsy Chaperone at 1998’s festival went on to win five Tony awards, and in 2009 My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding graduated to a full-budget Mirvish production, a Canadian tour, and a little follow-up show you may have heard of called Come From Away.

We’re overdue for another Fringe sleeper headed towards monster stardom, and it’s here. Our Little Secret: The 23&Me Musical has all the hallmarks of a hit. Stand in whatever line you need to, do whatever you can to catch this show before it goes nuclear. You’ll have bragging rights that you were there at the beginning.

The plot of Our Little Secret is more memoir than story, unspooling from its relatively simple core premise into complex questions about identity, heritage, fatherhood, masculinity, and kinship.

Noam Tomaschoff is a writer, actor, and performer working in L.A. On a summer vacation with his parents at their Ontario cottage, he offhandedly mentions that he’s bought a 23&Me genetic testing kit (it was on sale!). The next morning, his parents sit him down and reveal that he is not his father’s biological son. They used a sperm donor and kept this secret for over thirty years. Over the course of an hour, Noam discovers who provided half his genetic material, questions the validity of his Jewish identity, reaches out to his surprise half-siblings, and re-forges the bond he has with the parents who raised him. It’s ludicrous, unbelievable, and a perfect example of how the “most personal is most universal” (thanks, Carl Rogers!). Despite the weighty topic, the tone is gloriously light and funny. There is not a single false note in the entire show and no moment that feels clichéd. It’s an emotional ride of the best kind.

Noam is an accomplished and confident performer with great stage presence and a resonant tenor voice. The music does the heavy lifting here, and while not every song lands perfectly (there’s a line that made me wince where he cheekily rhymes “skillet” with “distill it”), the majority of them are bangers. There’s a deeply sweet leitmotif of questioning what it means to be a man and a father (these moments from Noam’s father’s perspective are heartbreakingly beautiful) and the 11 o’clock number is a Dropkick Murphys-esque Irish drinking song called “This Life Was Meant for Brothers” that brought down the house.

In June, Noam and his father Gideon gave an interview to the CBC where Noam explained that he wanted his parents to see the show in its entirety for the first time on opening night. And I was there for opening night too, to see Noam calling out his parents at his curtain call and watch Gideon wipe away tears of pride. This show is going to reach so many people in the future but it won’t be this intimate or raw. See it now in its first form if you can. But if you can’t, rest assured that it will come around again. A story that resonates likes this won’t stay hidden for long.

Our Little Secret: The 23&Me Musical plays at the Alumnae Theatre (70 Berkeley Street) from July 6 - 15, 2023. For more information, visit: Our Little Secret: The 23&Me Musical (ourlittlesecretmusical.com)