Gay actor Wesley Taylor (Only Murders in the Building, Smash) is very grateful to be back in Chicago performing in another theater world premiere—except for one crucial detail.
“I really wish I could be hired to work here in the summer,” Taylor said. “Every time I come to Chicago, it has been between November and March.”
Taylor previously starred as Lucas Beineke, the love interest of a teenage Wednesday Addams, in the 2009 Chicago pre-Broadway tryout of The Addams Family musical that played the James M. Nederlander Theatre (then known as the Oriental Theatre). Now, Taylor is appearing nearby at the Goodman Theatre in Holiday, a contemporary updating by late gay playwright Richard Greenberg (Take Me Out, Three Days of Rain) of the classic 1928 Broadway play by Philip Barry (The Philadelphia Story).
Holiday, which was later adapted into a 1938 film starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, focuses on a young man named Johnny Case who is surprised to find himself marrying into an old-money New York family known as the Setons. Case is engaged to middle sister Julia, but starts to wonder if her older sister, Linda, would be a better choice to align with his life goals.
In Holiday, Taylor plays Julia and Linda’s younger brother, Ned, who was arguably queer-coded in the original play set during Prohibition. In the script, Ned makes a joke about how all the illegal booze is stashed in his room and that any interested men at a New Year’s Eve party should exclusively be sent up there to meet him.
In Greenberg’s updating of Holiday, Ned still has enormous pressure of being the only son who was expected to carry on the family name. But now Ned is openly gay with severe addiction issues.
“He’s calling himself ‘California sober,’ which means he’s only drinking and smoking pot these days, but the drinking is still very serious,” said Taylor of Ned. “He’s much more colorful in the adaptation—more theatrical—perhaps more challenging for the family.”
Taylor is thrilled to be working on this re-imagined Holiday with former Goodman Theatre artistic director and Tony Award-winner Robert Falls, who similarly directed an update of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House reset to contemporary times by playwright Rebecca Gilman in the 2005 Chicago production of Dollhouse. But Taylor has regrets that he never got to meet Greenberg before he died of cancer in July of 2025.
“It’s a real loss not only, obviously, for the theater community,” Taylor said. “But in the room. Just to be in rehearsal working on his play and not to having him in the room feels like an immense loss—an absence.”
Taylor said Falls has been referring to previous drafts by Greenberg to aid in the staging of the final revised version of Holiday. Taylor likens the situation to director Joe Mantello working with playwright David Ives to create the 2023 staging of Here We Are which features a posthumous score by the late composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim.
Taylor’s first exposure to Greenberg was his 2003 Tony Award-winning Broadway drama Take Me Out, which is about a mixed-race major league baseball player who comes out as gay. Taylor saw the production three times with rush tickets while he still a closeted high school student.
“I just fell in love with Richard Greenberg’s language—let alone the visual feast I was served,” said Taylor, alluding to the copious amounts of shower-scene male nudity that was written into Take Me Out.
Though Holiday has recently slipped into the public domain, Taylor said the Philip Barry estate specifically commissioned Greenberg to write this updated version of the play.
“One of the reasons I think he was selected for this gig is the language is so elevated,” Taylor said. “This is an erudite, Upper East Side, affluent family. The way that Philip Barry wrote it is they were speaking in an elevated fashion and Greenberg meets the moment—the way he has always written his plays.”
As an openly gay actor, Taylor is proud of his past stage work. Regionally, Taylor starred as Michael “Mouse” Tolliver in Jake Shears and Jeff Whitty’s 2011 San Francisco musical adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. And in New York, Taylor also appeared in the original Broadway companies of Rock of Ages in 2009 and SpongeBob SquarePants in 2017 (which was filmed by Nickelodeon and televised in 2019 as The SpongeBob Musical: Live on Stage!).
Taylor is also known for co-writing and appearing the original gay digital series It Could be Worse from 2013 and Indoor Boys from 2017, plus co-writing with Alex Wyse the 2023 horror-comedy Summoning Sylvia.
And on the horizon, Taylor has a small role in the upcoming film The Devil Wears Prada 2. Yet Taylor said that contractually he “can’t really talk about it” until it’s released in May 2026.
“I just feel very lucky and grateful to be doing this play in this thriving artistic city,” said Taylor about Holiday. “I’d love people not to miss this, even in the brutal February winter.”
Holiday runs in previews from Jan. 31 through Feb. 8 with a 7 p.m. press opening Monday, Feb. 9, at the Goodman Theatre, 120 N. Dearborn St. The regular run continues through March 1. Tickets are $34 to $104, though demand may trigger dynamic pricing. Call 312-443-3800 or visit GoodmanTheatre.org/Holiday for more information.