Our Little Secret review: Adam Pascal's musical is an extraordinary story of donor conception - with plenty of room to grow

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• Title: Our Little Secret: A True New Musical
• Written by and starring: Noam Tomaschoff
• Directed by: Adam Pascal
• Music by: Ryan Peters
• Company: Russell Citron, presented by Mirvish Productions
• Venue: CAA Theatre
• City: Toronto
• Year: Runs until Nov. 22

Actor-writer Noam Tomaschoff has 35 half-siblings. Maybe more. As he tells it, new brothers and sisters are still coming out of the woodwork. His biological family’s so big that it doesn’t just have a group chat – it has a Facebook group.

None of that is a spoiler for Our Little Secret: A True New Musical, in which Tomaschoff recounts discovering at age 31 that he was conceived with donor sperm. The show’s premise isn’t a secret, or even a surprise: Its marketing materials spell out the 90-minute musical’s narrative arc in just a few sentences.

It’s a little strange, then, that the piece takes so long to introduce us to the crux of its story. When we meet Tomaschoff, who plays himself in the solo musical, he’s contemplating the dynamics of his family of three. Why do he and his father Gideon spar so much? What isn’t his mother Sylvie telling him? When, at dinner, he drops the bomb that he doesn’t want to have children – doing so would be unethical, he lectures – his dad storms out of the room. Why?

But, of course, we know why: It’s on the poster. Soon enough, a 23andMe test sees director Adam Pascal (famous for originating the role of Roger in Rent) employ a clever prop that only confirms the inevitable. Tomaschoff is not, in fact, an only child.

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Donor conception, like all things in the fertility industry, can be thorny. Of course, for some families, anonymous sperm is the ultimate symbol of love, the final puzzle piece in the creation of a desperately wanted child.

But the regulatory guardrails on sperm donation occasionally fail. Sometimes, donors surreptitiously father hundreds of children; sometimes, they omit key medical histories, making it harder for their future kids to understand their own health.

Tomaschoff lightly taps at these issues – he briefly wonders why his sperm donor chose to father so many children, before accepting such a choice was likely an act of altruism. (Was it?) Health-wise, he notes that his biological father had a full head of hair, so he probably doesn’t need to worry about going bald after decades of watching Gideon’s shiny head with reproach. But what else might be left to reveal?

Much of Our Little Secret, which premiered at the 2023 Toronto Fringe before playing in Edinburgh, Montreal and Edmonton, yanks at the heartstrings: Its strongest material sees Tomaschoff dissect his relationship with Gideon, the doting dad who drove his actor son to all manner of performances and gigs. (Yes, even a snowed-out production of Click Clack Moo in upstate New York.)

But there’s room yet for depth in Our Little Secret. One of the most compelling complications of Tomaschoff’s parentage is his Jewishness: Could his biology be to blame for his struggle to learn Hebrew, his feelings of distance from his parents’ faith? Jewish culture plays heavily in the musical, from a Klezmer-tinged sock puppet argument to conversations about Tomaschoff’s extended family in Israel, but the show stops short of digging into the frictions of his newly disrupted Jewish heritage.

Instead, we get many, many songs about what it means to be a man (indeed, Tomaschoff’s mother is largely sidelined). Ryan Peters’s pop-inspired score is jaunty and buoyant, but becomes repetitive by the conclusion of the show, whose lyrics often threaten to cloy. “Dad” rhymes with “sad,” “bad” and “mad”; “spoil it” rhymes with “toilet”; “stable” rhymes with “table.” You get the gist.

In a Fringe setting, those songwriting quibbles usually get a pass, and in Our Little Secret’s case, the story’s so compelling that a wash of uninspired rhymes ought not to matter too much. But Our Little Secret has been expanded since its 2023 premiere, and at 90 minutes, it feels like a stretched sweater, an hour-long show in an hour-and-a-half-long coat. Without drilling into those harder parts of the story, there’s a sense of Tomaschoff spinning his wheels to fill an off-Mirvish runtime.

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That’s not to say Our Little Secret is all bad – again, much of it, and especially its conclusion, is quite touching. Tomaschoff’s a gifted storyteller, easily filling the CAA Theatre with his stage presence and singing voice (one only wishes Peters’s score showed off more of his vocal range). Set designer Bruno-Pierre Houle conjures a lifetime of questions with small cardboard objects – a tiny house, a ukulele, a stack of alphabet blocks – and offers Tomaschoff an attractive playground to climb and explore.

Pascal’s direction mostly works, give or take an awkward moment of audience participation, but more to the point, it allows Tomaschoff and his story to take centre stage: Never does it feel as if anyone other than Tomaschoff is steering the ship of his deeply personal story.

But then again, that might be the problem. Tomaschoff is undoubtedly still working through this thing that happened to him – the secret his parents kept for three decades, the extraordinary network of siblings around the world who share his eyebrows and hairline. It’s not entirely surprising that Our Little Secret glosses over the pricklier parts of the story; those are likely the parts Tomaschoff and his family are continuing to unpack themselves.

Is it cheesy? Yes, at times, and mawkishly so. But with further revisions, Our Little Secret could tighten into a juggernaut of a solo show – and one that captures the complexities of donor conception, Jewish heritage and family dynamics in all their richly-deserving nuance.