Paul Morgan Donald
Paul Morgan Donald was born in Norman Wells, North West Territories, and spent his childhood living in various places across Canada. He began playing guitar in early childhood. He settled in Edmonton in 1981 and began working as a composer / sound designer under the pseudonym Thom. Perdu working with directors such as current Edmonton Opera Artistic Director Brian Deedrick (then the associate artistic director at Northern Light Theatre.)
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In the mid-80's, Paul began writing musicals with playwrights Conni Massing and Michael McKinlay. His musicals with McKinlay include Sleeping Together, Living Together, and Staying Together, a trilogy of one-act musicals commissioned by Nexus Theatre, and the rock musicals Papa Died Under One of Those Great Big Heads on Easter Island and Radio Free Music. His collaborations with Massing include BLT Down, and Remoka Rink, a musical about life at a small town hockey arena commissioned for the Alberta Winter Games in Fort McMurray.
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He spent 1989-90 in Europe during which (among other things) he worked as a lighting technician for the Royal Scottish Opera and busked, playing celtic harp songs on the streets of Portugal and Spain and electric ragas in the Paris Metro. His most surreal memory from this time is as a follow-spot operator stationed directly above the Royal box at a gala perfomance for the Scottish Opera, unable to see who was in the box and having a theatre full of people stand and look in his direction when the orchestra started playing 'God Save the Queen']
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In 1992 he became musical director of Edmonton improv group Die-Nasty. He wrote a series of musicals for the Great West Summer Theatre in Fort McLeod, Alberta: Big Sky, Yessiree, Bob!, and Me & My Bright Ideas. He collaborated with Dana Andersen, Stephanie Wolfe and John B. Lowe on Giant Ants! and with Adrien Lackey on Reefer Madness!
In 2001, unsure whether the world had enough ironically exclamation-point-ized musicals, he wrote, composed and directed Kink! a musical about 1950's pinup star Bettie Page which starred TV host Kimberly Carroll in the title role.
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He joined forces with fellow theatre sound designers Dave Clarke and Peter Moller (with the addition of ex-Puritans bassist Vladamir Sobelewski) to form a fictional punk rock band named The DeadRats. The DeadRats sole claim to fame was a power-pop ballad called Inflatable Sex Doll which rose to number 18 in the Japanese college charts of 1984 , yet they were inexplicably still trying to slog out an existence as relevant as artists 20 years later. A perpetual top twenty finalist as 'most rightfully dismissed punk band of all time.' they none-the-less fooled the public when they performed at the Edmonton Fringe Theatre Festival in DeadRats in GarageLand, DeadRats on Arrival, and DeadRats Go To Hell
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In 2003 he created Songs for a Dark Lady in which he cut-and-pasted the collected works of William Shakespeare into "the one-man musical he never gave" exploring the Bard's tortured relationship with his muse, the Dark Lady of the Sonnets.
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The Adventures of Wanda & Jack was a original alt-country musical Paul wrote with partner Michele Brown in 2004.
In 2008 they also collaborated on Death's Godson a musical retelling of a Spanish folktale.
