A human side of Deven May

AUDIENCES who last saw him sporting Vulcan ears, fake fangs and a shaved pate, greedily lopping up stage blood after beheading a cow, may have some trouble recognizing Deven May as the slick, pompadoured wiseguy Tommy DeVito in the Broadway hit “Jersey Boys.” Though the Tony-laden show about the Four Seasons singing group does have “Boys” in the title, May, the versatile actor best known for creating the title role in “Bat Boy: The Musical,” is all grown up now.

“I’m happy that people are now associating me with Tommy and ‘Jersey Boys,’ because Tommy is a man,” May said in a recent interview conducted, serendipitously, in a restaurant at Newark International Airport. May, in person a gregarious, excitable guy with a darkly chiseled look that wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1950s biker film, italicized the word “man” to stress not only Tommy’s maturity but his, er, species.

“Tommy’s not a bat creature,” May said with a relieved chortle. “After ‘Bat Boy,’ I remember going in for roles on things like ‘Dark Angel’ and ‘X-Files,’ and they were like, ‘Would you be Alligator Man?’ ‘Could you possibly be a sort of half-ape, half-foot -- a foot/ape boy?’ ”

Indeed, in the years since “Bat Boy” -- which May originated at the Actors’ Gang in 1997, then headlined in a successful off-Broadway run in 2001 and in a less stellar London bow in 2004 -- the actor, now 36, was in some danger of being typecast in Gothic rock-opera mode. He played a brooding artist in silk pants and trench coat in “Notre Dame de Paris,” the bloated French import that opened the Paris Las Vegas hotel, and he was in the San Francisco tryout cast of “Lestat,” the ill-fated Elton John-Linda Woolverton adaptation of Anne Rice’s vampire novels. (The producers bought him out of his contract before the show alighted briefly on Broadway, which, May confessed, made him “sad at the time, but I guess I dodged a bullet there.”)

Indeed, though May is an accomplished musical-theater triple threat, his odd, electric energy and beguiling mix of utter conviction and air-quotes irony make him a natural for outsized roles. When you’re willing and able to embody absurd, even otherworldly extremes, chances are you’ll be asked to go there.

“He is absolutely fearless,” said Larry O’Keefe, the composer of “Bat Boy” and, more recently, “Legally Blonde.” “He’s got a reckless energy; he can do just crazy stuff. But he is also unusually consistent for a young musical-theater hero.” That’s why O’Keefe keeps May’s name at the top of his Rolodex: “He’s always the one I call first whenever I have a gig.”

When O’Keefe and his lyricist partner, Nell Benjamin, tried out for jobs on the stage musical of “Shrek,” they called May. “He played the donkey in our ‘Shrek’ audition piece. He can do anything with his voice; friends who heard the recording were like, ‘Who’s that black guy?’ ”

Director Des McAnuff, who created “Jersey Boys” with book writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, spotted May at auditions over the years and noted his “extraordinary wolven, piercing blue eyes, like Sinatra” (quite an acting feat, since, for the record, May’s eyes are hazel, with gold and brown flecks).

“He’s a little larger than life, a little animated,” McAnuff said. “He has a bit of a swagger, and he has the greaser moves down. He’s very comfortable in that era. But he’s a complicated package: He can be extroverted and he can work it, but he’s also a genuine actor; he takes it very seriously.”

McAnuff recalled rehearsing a scene in which the Four Seasons are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with May as DeVito narrating the moment. “When he hit that speech the first time, he teared up,” McAnuff marvels. “He was talking about a band that had never before received the recognition it deserved from the rock ‘n’ roll aficionados. The fact that Deven understood that moment and was so moved by it was very significant.”

Off the stage, May’s bravado occasionally cracks to display the easy-touch sensitivity that is both the blessing and bane of all actors. When he spoke about his salesman father, who used to play Four Seasons eight-tracks in the family van in San Diego, May calmed his patter for a wistful spell.

“I wouldn’t say my father wasn’t supportive, but when I told him I was going to do acting, he said, ‘Don’t be a fool, boy,’ ” May recalled. “My parents wanted me to have a happy life, not a life full of dread and fear and drama, or being scared of where your next meal is going to come from.” But a recent e-mail from his dad “laid out the most emotion to me that he ever did -- he even wrote ‘I love you’ at the bottom. I mean, that blew me away.”

‘Chess’ moves

IT’S been nearly 10 years since May, who’d been making ends meet with graphic-design jobs and character work at Universal Studios, walked into a room at the Actors’ Gang’s old space in Hollywood and read for a micro-budget musical based on a character from the hilariously trashy tabloid the Weekly World News. Composer O’Keefe remembers the audition well.

“He had this beautiful head of long hair and this wicked sense of humor,” O’Keefe recalled. “He sang ‘Anthem’ from ‘Chess,’ which had been done to death in auditions, but he made us feel like he meant it. To make us even care about that song was thrilling in itself. We all just sort of looked at each other and knew he was the one. The first thing we said was, ‘Would you be willing to shave your head?’ ”

Keythe Farley, who co-wrote the script with Brian Flemming and directed the original Actors’ Gang run, recalled another important detail. “Right in the middle of his song, he gave a little tongue flick,” Farley said. “This massive ‘Chess’ anthem, mixed with a little bit of a bat noise -- that sort of did it.”

Indeed, if the key to “Bat Boy” is its over-the-top but uncannily straight-faced tone, May can be credited for more than just “getting” it but for helping to forge it and for maintaining it through three very different productions under three directors: co-author Farley in L.A., Scott Schwartz in New York and Mark Wing-Davey in London. There has been talk of a movie version to be directed by John Landis, but Farley characterized the project as mired in “development purgatory.”

May said he’s grateful to have had “Bat Boy” as “a constant in my life for the last 10 years.” But hitching along on the “Jersey Boys” juggernaut might constitute a new career chapter. As McAnuff said: “I hope he stays with the show for a while -- he brings a lot to it.”

The show has returned the favor, and not just on a professional level. While the “Bat Boy” creators jokingly saved a seat at every performance in case the “real” Bat Boy turned up, there was no question that the diminutive Italian American who embraced May on the opening night of “Jersey Boys” in San Francisco this year was the real Tommy DeVito.

“He comes up to me, hooks his arm around my neck, and in his raspy New Jersey accent, says, ‘I’m so ... proud o’ you!’ And that was it, I was in tears; I was done,” May recalled. He has since become good friends with DeVito, who was booted from the Four Seasons in midcareer for his gambling debts and apparent mob ties but is now on good terms with his former surviving bandmates.

“He’s portrayed as sort of the pariah of the group,” May said. “And those stories have a lot of truth to them. But Tommy has a heart as big as I can imagine.” Now based in Las Vegas, DeVito, according to May, “has been sort of this waystation for people coming out from the East Coast who want to make it on the West Coast,” including fellow Jersey-ite Joe Pesci. “He’s gotten them jobs, helped get them on their feet.”

The peripatetic May is unlikely to need any similar generosity any time soon.

“I’ve not lacked for work,” said May, who has supplemented his acting income with head-shot photography and innumerable readings and workshops. “I like the small screen and the big screen, but the stage seems to always be calling me. But I’m usually happy where I am.”

Spoken like a man.

*

‘Jersey Boys’

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Aug. 31

Price: $20 to $100

Contact: (213) 972-4400