Paul Jabara
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Paul Jabara (January 31, 1948 - September 29, 1992) was an American actor and songwriter.
Jabara was in the original cast of the stage musicals Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. He is best known, however, for writing Donna Summer's Oscar and Grammy Award-winning hit "Last Dance" from Thank God It's Friday (1978) and Barbra Streisand's Golden Globe-nominated song "The Main Event/Fight" from The Main Event (1979). Jabara also played the role of Carl, the unlucky-in-love and short-sighted disco goer in Thank God It's Friday.
Jabara won the 1979 Grammy Award for Best R&B Song for "Last Dance" and the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
He later penned Streisand & Summer's duet "No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)", which was a Billboard number-one hit. His credits also include the Weather Girls disco hit "It's Raining Men," co-written with Paul Shaffer.
He wrote the book, music, lyrics and starred in the Broadway musical Rachael Lily Rosenbloom (And Don't You Ever Forget It) which played the Broadhurst Theatre in New York City in 1973. It closed in previews prior to its official opening and was never reviewed by the press. No recording was made of the score, which featured both Jabara's trademark disco music as well as more traditional Broadway-style numbers. In 2005, a workshop of a musical entitled Last Dance played New York City. It was a musical assembled from Jabara's well-known disco songs and told the story of a modern-day teenager who goes back in time to spend one night at Studio 54.
[edit] Red Ribbon Project
Jabara was co-founder of the Red Ribbon Project, an artists' collective, and is believed by some to have conceived and distributed the first red AIDS ribbons, although the Red Ribbon Project specifically renounced the notion of any individual authorship.[1] Jabara died from lymphoma related to AIDS at the age of 44. He is interred in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
