March 1, 2000

could lay claim to was a precocious talent, which earned him an Equity card long before he had received his diploma. De Haas recalls thinking his dismissal from academia was an unusual move--but he accepted the professor's advice, left college and set off for New York City, ready to take on the uncertainties of professional life. His incubation period was over.

The Obie-winning 31-year-old has never looked back. Reared in a highly musical family (his uncle is the noted jazz singer-pianist Andy Bey, his dad an accomplished jazz bassist, and both his mother and aunt have appeared in popular musicals), de Haas remembers music being intertwined with the very fibers of domestic life. As a kid, he learned his tunefulness along with his ABCs and never stopped singing.

His adult career so far has been marked by a playful amplitude. As Broadway's busiest understudy, he performed a half-dozen characters in Rent in the space of a single week; when a leading role came his way he transformed himself into the emotional center of the quietly volcanic musical Running Man, in its premiere last season at Manhattan's Here performance space. In the role of Tommy, the gifted son in an African-American family, de Haas painted a vivid picture of a childhood prodigy's descent into heroin addiction, performing Diedre Murray's eclectic compositions with an ease that belied the difficulty of the music. If it seemed like the role was tailor-made for his vocal range, that's because it was.

A full year before Running Man opened at Here, Murray and her librettist, the poet Cornelius Eady, conducted an extensive workshop with director Diane Paulus and the cast. The story cut close to the bone; Murray herself had had a brother whose truncated life paralleled the one de Haas portrayed onstage. "In the workshop, Diedre was able to hear what I did vocally, and she started fashioning the music to my voice," says de Haas. "That's the greatest compliment one can get.
The role allowed de Haas to explore onstage some of the aspects of his own sexuality, as he portrayed Tommy's struggle to discover himself as a gay man. In one scene, the character steals into his mother's bedroom and tries on her lipstick--a tableau de Haas infused with Oedipal tension. "That scene was very condensed, full of so many little nuances," he recalls. "The simplest gesture or change of posture could say so much--and it was something I had struggled with in my own life, in dealing with my identity. How much am I willing to expose? It was a great purging of a lot of unspoken things."

As he enacted Tommy's androgynous awakening, de Haas was also looking for communion with the audience. "It was important to me that I be accepted, not only critically, but by the black people in the audience. I was wondering; 'How are they dealing with this? Do they want to see it?"'

performance as the title character's bon vivant brother Paris in Marie Christine, Michael John LaChuisa's Creole updating of the Medea myth, highlights de Haas at his most impish and urbane. "I enjoy roles like Paris or Tommy because these characters seem able to throw caution to the wind," he says. "I'm a little more private." In the Lincoln Center Theater's production, de Haas's Paris has a taste for amorous mischief--standing on a balcony overlooking an opulent New Orleans masked ball, he sings a musical poem about Pierrot. The lyrics trace a man's possession by the moon, inviting the viewer to enter into madness and pageantry.

The scene belongs expressly to de Haas, whose lithesome, mixed-race libertine reflects all the paradoxes of being a Creole in late-l9th-century New Orleans, a city aswirl with racial contradictions. Raised as a servant in his white father's estate house, Paris is a beneficiary and a captive of an intricate caste system. De Haas explains, "Even today in New Orleans they still have the brown-paper-bag test at some parties--if you're darker than the shade of the brown paper, you can't be admitted. There are people who still say, 'I'm not black, I'm Creole.' It's a bizarre and very interesting culture. The fun of playing Paris is how he tries to buck against it, with charm and with a smile."