Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy

In Love’s Labor’s Lost, Don Adriano de Armado is almost always played purely as a buffoon, and an endlessly talkative one at that. So, like many of Shakespeare’s extravagantly comic characters with their time-bound puns and word games, he tends to be more annoying than amusing. But in this production, John Hutton created something altogether different, a man who may be ridiculous, but who’s also vulnerable, surprising and sometimes — in an odd way — downright clever. It’s an interpretation that adds freshness and dimension to a venerable play.