Whitney Players Find Home in Addams Family Revival

Cindy Simell-Devoe has spent the past two decades raising a ​“family” of over 1,000 extended members, 42 of whom have finally returned to their home on Hamden High’s stage this week after more than a year of displacement and dramatic disappointments.

The Whitney Players, a nonprofit organization that aims to bring ​“affordable and high quality entertainment” to Hamden in the form of plays and musicals, is celebrating their 20th anniversary and pandemic comeback Wednesday through Saturday with their interpretation of The Addams Family.

“Normally this would be the time when I’m pulling my hair out,” Simell-Devoe said in the week leading up to opening night. ​“But the kids keep teasing me, saying ​‘you’re so calm!’ I’m just so grateful to be here.”

The theater company had originally planned to present The Addams Family last summer. On March 11, 2020, Mayor Curt Leng, whose son is a member of the Whitney Players, called Simell-Devoe the day before the group was scheduled to perform their first showing of the spring — and informed her that she’d have to shut down for the foreseeable future.

That meant refunding all of the tickets that were sold, and, later on, returning parents’ deposits for the acting summer camp she runs every year. Also, at the beginning of the pandemic, the acting mentor of Simell-Devoe, and of several other adult Whitney Players who studied at Albertus Magnus, passed away.

Those personal and financial losses were a shock to a system that had, up until the pandemic tipping point, appeared to be boundless and thriving.

The birth story of the Whitney Players played out as follows: Four moms, looking to ​“give our kids something to do,” developed a small, all-age acting troupe back in 2000. Joan Christensen was one of those mothers, who at the time was about fourteen years into running the Joan Lynn Dance Center & Company, which is currently located on Sanford St. in Hamden.

Christenson met Simell-Devoe in 1986, the year she had first opened her studio in North Branford.

“I had a baby in 1986 and needed to lose weight,” Simell-Devoe recalled. ​“So I went to aerobics!”

While others moved on from The Players once their kids grew up, Simell-Devoe and Christensen continued to invest in their passionate director-choreographer partnership — and in the talent and drive they had uncovered among their fellow community members.

In turn, one musical per summer expanded into one show each season, tuition-based youth performance workshops in the fall and spring, and a summer camp beginning every June. In 2004, The Whitney Players transitioned into nonprofit status. Despite rapidly increasing numbers of folks coming out to audition — reaching up to a maximum of 100 compared to an original 20 — ​“nobody is turned away,” Simell-Devoe said (with the exception, she noted, of one little girl whose ​“mother dragged her in” to audition when she ​“clearly didn’t want to be there).

“My theory of education,” Simell-Devoe, who also ran a daycare for a separate 20 years, likes to say, ​“is that you let the person lead you. If someone’s got an urge to do something, you take care of that urge.”

The result has been ​“over 1,000 families” who have participated in the company. Simell-Devoe said she still keeps in touch with every one of them.

That sense of family has also become more literal over the years. Both Simell-Devoe and Joan Christensen’s children, now adults, work in the arts and help out with technical aspects of the company’s theatrical productions.

Rachelle Ianniello, a longtime player who is starring as Morticia in The Addams Family, shared that she met her husband, Christensen’s nephew, a dance teacher, through a Whitney Player’s Booze Cruise fundraiser.

“I made wedding soup to serve that night,” Simell-Devoe recalled.

She added: ​“Rachelle got more out of this than most.”

The company is made up of students, parents, school teachers, politicians — like Jay Kaye, who is running for Hamden’s Legislative Council this November — and other community leaders. The actors who participate in the players range in age from 4 months to 90 years old.

For high schoolers in the company, Covid-19 meant the heartbreak of missing out on both school and outside performances.

Elena Farley, an 18-year-old who auditioned for the Whitney Players at age 3, ​“came in crying” to rehearsal last March when Hamden High’s production of Little Women was canceled due to Covid-19. But she was celebrated by her Whitney Players family when accepted into the Berklee Boston Conservatory this year to study musical theater.

“She’s got the voice of a god, a thousand times over,” Matthew Reilly, who also graduated from high school this year, said of Farley. He, like Farley, first participated in a show with the Whitney Players when he was a young kid. For him, however, it was a one time deal.

“I wasn’t really interested in anything as a kid,” he recalled, describing how he came from a big sports family. But, one day, when he was 16, he started watching musical theater clips on Youtube. All of a sudden, he said, ​“I caught the acting bug.”

“I realized, I want to do this. I love this.” Since he was shy, he started as an usher for school plays. Simell-Devoe spotted him at one of those performances and said, ​“Hey, I remember you — you should come audition for us.”

First, he got the courage to audition alongside Farley for a role in Little Women, but ​“choked” on his song and wasn’t cast. So, he rallied and auditioned for a spot in High School Musical with the Whitney Players — and got a part. ​“Cindy was really comforting,” he said, explaining why he performed better the second time around us.

Reilly will perform as Lucas in The Addams Family, one of the lead roles. ​“We have members who have been acting here for 40, 50, 60 years,” Simell-Devoe noted. ​“That Lucas would get a lead with only one year of experience speaks to his talent— he worked that hard. He’s our Covid poster child!” she stated.

Once he started with the Whitney Players, Reilly said, he went from being ​“super shy and closed in, not really talking to anybody,” to a kid who had something to care about.

Plus, he added, ​“I’ve gotten so many friends. I’m having a good time!”

For company members on the older side of the spectrum, there have been other types of losses— and comforts.

Burt Glassman, who at 90 years old is the senior member of the company, remembered trying out with his wife for the Whitney Players back when the organization had just started. ​“I got the role and she didn’t,” he said with a laugh, before beginning to weep. His wife, he shared, died two years ago in 2019.

Simell-Devoe hugged him.

“We love together, we lose together,” she said, just as her company members had said when they collectively mourned the passing of their shared acting coach in 2020.

It is each member’s desire and talent for describing humanity through speech, music, and movement that has tied them together as a family— and that provided Simell-Devoe with the determination necessary to avoid ​“missing a beat” during the pandemic to keep the company’s pulse pumping.

While she had to cancel summer camp, she brought ten kids over to do socially distanced theater work in her backyard. In the fall, she taught remote acting workshops and in the winter she hosted a ​“Holiday Cabaret” over Zoom, bringing together top talent from the past years who now live across the country for a joint show.

When Covid-19 cases fell this spring, she was able to host the performance of High School Musical Jr. with her summer camp students, the show she had scheduled for the previous year. After that, she was ready for an exciting, upbeat musical, like ​“The Prom,” to showcase her full company, but she couldn’t get the scripts. So, she ended up moving forward with the Addam’s Family, the show that had been canceled when the pandemic hit.

“At first I thought it was the wrong choice. It’s a dark comedy, right after a pandemic.” (One song in the show revolves around the line, sung gleefully by a chorus, ​“death is just around the corner.”)

“Now I feel it was meant to be,” she stated.

The show is, after all, about family reuniting. Ghostly ancestors comprise the chorus.

Simell-Devoe said that all of the folks that the company’s actors have lost in recent years will be there as well: ​“You know what they say, they always get the best seats.:

When Covid cases began to spike again, Simell-Devoe found clear masks for the actors to wear, ones that are practically invisible from the audience’s perspective. ​“If anything,” she said, ​“I worry I’m gonna make the audience uncomfortable because they’ll think they’re not wearing masks.”

While shows are usually open to all ages, she limited this cast to a minimum age of 12, so that all of her actors could be vaccinated. That didn’t limit the show’s amount of theatrical force, however. The show is double casted, a rare situation that Simell-Devoe said is only possible when the ​“talent presents itself.”

“Two thirds of our company is lead quality,” she said. ​“The others are rising stars.” Many of Simell-Devoe’s students and players graduate the Whitney Players for Broadway or go on to careers in the arts. Burt Glassman has proudly appeared in television commercials for Companion and Homemakers, Bradley Airport, and Mystic Seaport.

However, she clarified that the purpose of The Whitney Players is not necessarily to shove out success stories. ​“People dismiss local theater, and pay so much money to go to a broadway show. Then they come to our productions, and say, ​‘where did you get all this talent?’

In your own backyard,” she answered. ​“It’s your friends and neighbors. It’s all in your community.”

Thursday at 7:30 p.m. is the opening performance for The Addams Family ​“Cast B.” Buy tickets in advance here or at the doors of Hamden High School.