A spur-of-the-moment sale on a DNA kit in 2022 upended Noam Tomaschoff's life. The 35-year-old, who grew up in Toronto and now works as a tour guide in Washington DC, learned at his parents' kitchen table that the man who raised him was not his biological father — he was conceived with a sperm donor. When the results came back two months later, he discovered he had at least 15 half-siblings; the count has since climbed past 35, with more likely out there.
Rather than quietly absorbing the news, Tomaschoff turned it into theatre. With two high school friends from Toronto — Russell Citron and Ryan Peters — he created Our Little Secret, a one-man musical tracing the whole saga from that kitchen-table bombshell to the growing sibling network. It premiered at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2023 and later played in Edinburgh, Montreal and Edmonton before returning to Toronto.
His parents, Gideon Tomaschoff and Sylvie Leone, were initially horrified — the secret had never been shared with anyone in their circle, and the doctor who arranged the donor decades ago had advised keeping it that way. "The whole industry was based on secrecy," his father said. But they eventually came around, and now consider the show a family project. His biological father, who died two years before the truth came out, had met some of the donor siblings; Tomaschoff has connected with that man's raised son through a Facebook group for the shared-donor family.
The story's best twist came at a recent Sunday performance in Toronto, when seven of those "diblings" — half-siblings from the same donor — flew in from across the United States to surprise him. Two of them, Brandy Erwin of Greenville, South Carolina, and Kayla Breese of Cumberland, Rhode Island, coordinated the trip after meeting at an earlier reunion in Fort Lauderdale. Producer Citron announced their presence at curtain call, and Tomaschoff ran into a tearful audience to embrace them. Leslie Hicks, 43, the first sibling to message him — "She welcomed me to 'the tribe'" — flew in from Fort Lauderdale too.
Not everything was neatly resolved. Some siblings declined to be photographed, and several families are still processing decades-old secrets. But the show has clearly done its job for the Tomaschoffs. "He took this thing and leveraged it into something that healed him, healed us, healed the whole family," his father said. Audiences frequently approach Tomaschoff afterwards with their own DNA-discovery stories, which is exactly what he hopes for: "I hope it makes people feel seen."
For travellers, the takeaway is that Toronto's Fringe scene keeps producing work with real stories behind it — and that a chance festival ticket can come with an emotional payoff no guidebook predicts. Catch Our Little Secret if it tours again, and build a trip around the city's theatre district while you're at it.
