It was the month before he was set to graduate from UChicago with a degree in mathematics, and Jared Janas, AB’94, was feeling restless. He complained to a friend that he was sitting around with nothing to do, so she invited him to help with hair and makeup for a University Theater production of the Stephen Sondheim musical Assassins.

At that time, Janas had seen only three musicals (Annie, Les Misérables, and Miss Saigon) and never so much as picked up a powder puff—but he was game to try. By the end of the three-weekend run of Assassins, Janas was transformed.

“My entire life had been filled with experiences of logic, not of art,” he says. He hadn’t had much exposure to the arts growing up (“we were a poor family,” he says, “and art is a luxury to the poor”); he’d leaned toward math and science because he was good at them. But now, “there was something artistic that suddenly opened up in me that I had no idea even existed.” He wasn’t yet sure how to make his newfound passion into a living; that, he realized, was a different kind of math problem to solve.

Since his first brush with brushes, Janas has become one of Broadway’s most in-demand hair and makeup designers. For the 2022–23 season, he designed hair, makeup, and wigs for three Tony-nominated musicals: & Juliet, Kimberly Akimbo, and the revival of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. This season he’s working on Once Upon a Mattress and Our Town on Broadway, alongside several off-Broadway productions and national tours.

Janas works closely with a show’s costume designer and director to create the characters’ onstage looks, whether through historical research, artistic license, or a combination of both. Once a production is up and running, actors are typically responsible for doing their own makeup (and sometimes hair), so Janas’s job also involves teaching them how to achieve his vision on their own.

His present success came through years of nights-and-weekends work. After graduating from college, Janas honed his craft by practicing hair and makeup on himself and friends and by offering his services for free to community theaters in Chicago. He moved to New York City in 1996 and built his theatrical resume while working full time as a mathematician and education researcher. (During this time, he also learned the craft of wig-making through an apprenticeship with a men’s hair replacement company, Top Priority.)

Costume designer Tracy Christensen—Janas’s longtime friend and frequent collaborator—thought he was kidding when she first found out he had been a mathematician before starting in hair and makeup design. “Like, ‘yeah, I was an astronaut and lived on Mars.’ I mean, I just thought we were being funny.”

But she thinks his nontraditional path is part of what sets Janas and his work apart. “He’s smart as a whip,” Christensen says, and knows how to create looks that tell a story.

In 2005 Janas was finally able to quit his day job, and by 2012, he had made his Broadway debut with the revival of Porgy and Bess starring Audra McDonald. “It’s still the show that holds the biggest place in my heart,” he says, because he was involved with the production from its inception: “It’s what I call ‘the trifecta’ for a designer. It’s what all designers want—to start the show pre-Broadway, bring it to Broadway, and take it on tour.”

Sometimes his work can involve helping the creative team understand what they don’t want, as Janas learned while working on Sweeney Todd last year. The director and costume designers had settled on an 1830s look for the production, but Janas found himself arguing against strict period authenticity for the hair.

Historically accurate 1830s hair would feature severe center parts and massive ringlets that look almost silly to the modern eye. Whenever you’re designing a show set in the past, Janas explains, “you’re designing it in period through the lens of today”—in other words, you have to keep in mind how something looks to contemporary audience members. (Think of Gone with the Wind, he notes—the movie may be set in the 1860s, but the eyebrows are all 1930s.)

In the end, the director and costume designer “were very willing to listen to me and what I had to say,” and Janas’s final designs offered an 1830s-inspired look that also reflected modern sensibilities. (As Mrs. Lovett, for instance, Annaleigh Ashford got two frizzy, off-kilter updos that don’t fit tidily into any particular historical moment.) It was “the best design experience of my life,” Janas declares.

Kimberly Akimbo, a musical about a teenager with a rapid-aging disease, offered another head-scratching temporal challenge. Janas had to design a wig that told the story of a 16-year-old living in a 70-year-old body in 1999. They settled on a long wig with subtle gray tones—and threw in a few butterfly clips for period authenticity.

The opportunity to learn about new things—cultures, time periods, musical styles—is one of Janas’s favorite parts of his career in the theater. “There’s so many things I’ve learned in life,” he says, “not because I learned them in school but because I did a show about them.”