This has been a very good summer for the 1960s. Dream a Little Dream, the Mamas and The Papas saga continues at Florida Stage and, not to be outdone, The Lake Worth Playhouse has a worthy production of Hair, the ground-breaking "American tribal love-rock musical," on through Sat., Aug. 9.

Director-choreographer Rob Dawson deserves much of the credit for assembling the show and teaching his too-young-to-be-around-then cast what the hippie revolution was about. And you’ve got to love lighting designer Josh Gumbinner's kaleidoscopic acid backdrop.

Standouts in the cast are Shane Blanford as Claude Hooper Bukowski, who also carried last summer's Rocky Horror Show as cross-dressing Frank N. Furter. Emily Riedel (Crissy) does a nice job with the plaintive Frank Mills and Gina Nespoli (Sheila) gives a powerful rendition of Easy to be Hard. (Nespoli's number is probably the most dramatic song in the show, though I've never understood why it is so weakly motivated by Claude's rejection of a yellow shirt she made him.)

Anyway, there are weak links in the ensemble (The Tribe), but you would probably get a time-travel trip back to the '60s if you caught one of the show's final performances.

The only department that the Playhouse's production comes up short is in the infamous nude scene at the end of the first act. If that is why you're going, you might as well stay home. At last Saturday evening's performance, few of the cast members participated in the voluntary doffing of their duds. I asked artistic director Jodie Dixon-Mears if it was an off-night nudity-wise and she noted that a few cast members' parents were in the audience that night, which definitely affected the performers' inhibitions.

Call the Lake Worth Playhouse's box office for last minutes tickets, (561) 586-6410.

I only met Estelle Getty once, but it was an encounter I still remember and savor.

Long before she rocketed to national attention and an Emmy Award for playing Sophia in The Golden Girls, Getty stunned Broadway with her rollicking, smart-mouthed performance as Harvey Fierstein's mother in Torch Song Trilogy.

Following New York, she remained in the role on tour and, in the late summer of 1984, the Tony-winning play came to Washington, D.C., where I was covering the theater scene. I had interviewed Fierstein and, since he was coming to town to monitor the production's quality, he invited me to dinner. (No, I have no idea whether he assumed I was gay - isn't everyone? - but the story of my date with him has entertained my gay friends for a long time.)

Anyway, he and I entered the theater unannounced and ticketless - you can do that when you are the play's author and former star - and we went up to the balcony, where Fierstein proceeded to wince at and bad-mouth every line reading by Charles Adler, a perfectly capable actor who happened to give the role of drag queen Arnold Beckoff a different spin than Fierstein did.

Afterwards, we went backstage and Harvey introduced me to Estelle. She had stolen the show and he lavished praise on her, while completely falling into the son-and-mother patter that they played for so long on stage. He would say provocatively off-color things to her and they would go right over her head. Later, he told me that their relationship was not unlike Groucho Marx and the divinely oblivious Margaret Dumont.

As you probably know by now, Estelle fought dementia for the last decade of her life, which ended on Tuesday. Of course, she was great in The Golden Girls and when I get some time, I plan to break out the DVDs I have of that series.

But to me, she will always be Mrs. Beckoff.

More and more, superhero movies are no longer kid's stuff. Last week, Guillermo del Toro showed how to combine an arthouse sensibility with a fanboy's affection for comic book lore with the surprisingly mature Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Sure there was plenty of violence and computer wizardry, but for me what set the movie apart from the field was the opening exposition that was conveyed through a puppet show and a quirky scene in which the title red-skinned mutant and his crony Abe Sapien break into a cheesy rendition of Barry Manilow's Can't Smile Without You. Try that, Iron Man.

And, of course, the most anticipated movie of the summer - maybe after Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - is The Dark Knight, the second Batman film from Christopher Nolan, a director with an indie mindset who shows he can also handle a $150 million budget. To me, he far outdoes his work on Batman Begins, which seemed awfully generic in its second half, after we learned how Bruce Wayne became the caped crusader.

I saw the new movie Tuesday evening in the eye-popping IMAX format and here is my report:

Most superhero movies are content to pit good against evil. What sets Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight apart from the crowd -- and earns its "dark" label, thematically-speaking -- is that the film makes little distinction between good and evil.

For starters, Nolan (and his screenwriting partner/brother Jonathan) asks what is a superhero but a vigilante who breaks the law by taking it into his own hands.
And when that vigilante, Gotham City's caped crusader Batman, is up against a supremely sick, sadistic adversary like The Joker, all rules of superhero propriety are off.

You could call The Dark Knight a fight to the finish, but that would leave us with no opportunity for a sequel match-up. Instead, just call it the action-adventure movie against which all others will now be measured.

Nolan has towering questions of morality on the brain, but that never slows his taste for explosive action at regular intervals. From an opening bank robbery sequence perpetrated by a handful of clowns to a high-speed urban chase that climaxes in a flipped semi truck to a detonated hospital, fans of mayhem are going to love The Dark Knight. Nolan may be a thinking man's director as superhero flicks go, but he also knows how to blow stuff up.

Returning as Batman/Bruce Wayne is suave, restrained Christian Bale, who is understandably upstaged by the late Heath Ledger as the maniacal, sadistic Joker. From his marionette movements to his deranged vocal delivery, this is the clown we all knew enough to be scared of as kids. At one point, he gleefully torches a mountain of money, demonstrating that greed was never his motive. He is simply an embodiment of evil, an apolitical terrorist, and Ledger's commitment to the role is unnerving.

If anything, The Dark Knight has an overload of bad guys. First, there is a gang of Batman copycats who are out of control and an army of mobsters who come under The Joker's command. But even a crusading district attorney like Harvey Dent (a sincere Aaron Eckhart) can turn to the dark side and live up to his nickname Two-Face. Then there's a lowly bookkeeper at Wayne Enterprises (West Palm Beach's Joshua Harto) whose discovery of an accounting discrepancy suddenly makes him a threat to Batman's secret identity. (See my interview with Harto in this Sunday’s Palm Beach Post.)

And that is just a few of the major characters in the Nolans' dense, yet agile screenplay, which remains true to Batman's D.C. Comics roots, while exploring their darker implications. At over two-and-a-half hours, the movie feels a bit long, but there is no fat in this sinisterly intertwined story line.

Nolan shows off his special effects toys with some awesome gliding sequences for Batman, but for most of the movie he is intent on keeping things real. Gotham is usually seen as a mythic, generic cityscape, but here it is recognizably Chicago. He uses the comic book genre for this subversive agenda, but makes us care about these characters, some of whom do not survive the film.

Satisfying the fan base while slipping in plenty to contemplate about the nature of evil may be Nolan's best having-his-cake-and-eating-it trick. Heath Ledger's Joker dominates The Dark Knight -- even when he is offscreen -- but it is former independent filmmaker Nolan who gets the last laugh.

I have long been liberated from my glasses, first by contact lenses and more recently by laser surgery, so the last thing I want when I go to the movies is to be handed a pair of glasses to wear for the sake of 3-D effects.

A) Although the multi-planar effect has definitely been improved over the years, little progress has been made in the comfort, or lack of it, when wearing the glasses. But more importantly, B) once a director decides to shoot a movie in 3-D, he feels obligated to emphasize the gimmick, which invariably fights with the story for dominance.

Take the new Journey to the Center of the Earth, being projected in many theaters with a 3-D system known as Real D. It is is studded with hokey effects, such as a yo-yo unfurling straight at the audience, carnivorous flying fish in our faces and, my personal favorite, Brendan Fraser expectorating after brushing his teeth, captured from the viewpoint of the sink drain. Who said today's movies are not better than ever?

As a result, Jules Verne's terrific science fiction novel has been reduced to kid's stuff, aimed squarely at the pre-teen market.

I know I'm dating myself, but I can remember seeing the 1959 version, when the unlikely crew of James Mason, Pat Boone and Arlene Dahl went subterranean. While that movie took plenty of liberties with the source material, it seems positively faithful compared to this new release, which posits that the journey actually took place and Verne was merely the conduit for the expedition's log.

So an underwriting-strapped professor of geology named Trevor (Fraser), who takes his visiting nephew Sean (Josh Hutcherson) down below to prove that the boy's father successfully proved his theory of "volcanic tubes," and did not die in vain far beneath the earth's surface.

Yeah, whatever.

Rookie director Eric Brevig and his trio of writers take their time getting the movie in gear, but once Fraser, Hutcherson and Anita Briem, a comely lass who plays an Icelandic scientist's daughter fall through the rabbit hole, they then waste little time riding roller coaster-like mine carts, dodging those killer fish, running from a frisky Tyrannosaurus Rex and trying to catch the next geyser to be rocketed back to the earth's surface.

While realism has no place in a movie like this, production designer David Sandefur never persuades us that we are looking at anything other than movie sets. And unfortunately, the movie it most brings to mind is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which could not be what was intended.

Fraser has previously shown that he is an accomplished actor (Gods and Monsters), but he is completely defeated here by the tin-eared dialogue he is given. Nor was it a good idea to insert a romance between Fraser and Briem, who looks young enough to be his daughter. Creepy.

Only those hooked on the novelty of 3-D should bother taking this Journey. If you do not need to see water spit at you, there are better places to spend your summer movie money.

Just in case you were wondering, the new mythic, bullet-bending action-fantasy Wanted offers proof that The Matrix movies made it to Kazakhstan. For Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch and Day Watch) has clearly cribbed from the Wachowski brothers and, in many ways, outdone them in this fasten-your-seat-belt violent ride.

Based on a series of comics by Mark Millar and J. G. Jones, the film begin a thousand years ago and yet is cinematically up-to-the-minute. Bekmambetov arrives on our shores with a breezy, brawny storytelling style, intensified by every trick in the computer-enhancement textbook.

He grabs our attention immediately with an action sequence of an assassin's death, after he crashes through a skyscraper's window wall and leaps to a rooftop patio across the boulevard. The hitman turns out to have been the estranged father of stressed-out account manager Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), who learns of his dad's death and profession from a foxy, tattooed woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie, in full Mr. and Mrs. Smith mode).

She saves Wesley from being killed in a convenience store shootout, pulls him into her sports car and continues the high speed duel, careening through the streets of Chicago. By this point, we have almost no idea where the movie is headed, but we know our pulse is racing.

Convinced that Wesley has the genes of a super-assassin, Fox takes him to the inner sanctum of the Fraternity, a millenium-old organization that systematically offs bad guys based on coded patterns in textiles woven long ago. Yes, Wanted is going to require numerous leaps of faith, but Bekmambetov moves the story along so fast you will not have time to pause and question.

Before he can be accepted into the Fraternity, Wesley goes through a brutal training/hazing that leaves him bloodied and bruised. But another intriguing element of the Wanted ethos is a tallow body bath with miraculous curative powers.

Eventually, Wesley learns the art of bending bullet trajectories, becomes a full-fledged Fraternity member and begins his own killing spree, only to learn that the victims may have been chosen by rigged weaving. From there, Bekmambetov shifts into overdrive, with runaway trains and plot twists. Had Wanted been released in any season other than summer, it would feel out of place. Now it is merely well-timed excess.

McAvoy (Atonement) is nicely buffed and quite convincing as unexpected assassin Wesley, even though Jolie looks like she could kick his keister at will. Morgan Freeman adds a bit of class to the film as Fraternity honcho Sloan, adding an edge of malevolence to his line readings for ambiguity's sake.

Perhaps because it arrives with little hype, Wanted seems like such a welcome surprise. But if Bekmambetov is not already planning a sequel, he is missing a good bet.

We jump to conclusions about movies. Like M. Night Shyamalan is going to come up with a surprise ending. Or Pixar is going to gear its animated movies to youngsters. Both reasonable assumptions and both wrong.

Consider Wall-E, the latest from Pixar and likely to have the lowest box office of any of the 13-year-old boutique studio's film. I think it's a brilliant movie, but there is not enough in it for kids. That's fine with me, but families that trust the brand will probably be sorely disappointed.

Instead of a children's film with a layer of humor for adults, the folks who brought us Toy Story and Finding Nemo have come up with a heady science fiction saga about a rusty trash-compacting robot named Wall-E (for Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth class), whose lot in life is to make metal cubes of scrap on a water-depleted, uninhabitable Earth in the far future.

Picture a cartoon version of Blade Runner, I Am Legend or 2001: A Space Odyssey, the last underscored by a musical snippet of the Thus Spake Zarathustra fanfare. But to call it a cartoon is hardly fair, for Pixar has rendered this dystopian world with a visually stunning photo-realism that comes as close as animation ever has to the look of live action.

As close as the film gets to cuddly sidekicks is a cockroach -- an homage to Jiminy Cricket? -- that follows Wall-E about. (Yes, apparently they do survive any global disaster.) And so it goes, until one day a massive mothership lands, dropping off a tiny, shiny egg-shaped probe named EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), and Wall-E is instantly smitten.

He follows her aboard the vessel, a huge cruise ship hovering above Earth, waiting for improved conditions there. The ship is a division of Buy N Large -- sort of a futuristic Costco. EVE carries on a fragile plant sprout, proving that Earth can sustain life again, but returning might not be in the company's best interests.

So OK, kids, get ready for a feature-length ecology lecture, layered with messages about corporate greed, warnings about dependence on robots and lessons about the limits of technology. There is nothing Mickey Mouse about Wall-E, a major achievement for Pixar artistically, but I suspect it will be a major box office disappointment as well.

Add to the potential challenge to youngsters -- and asset for adults -- the fact that Wall-E is almost entirely non-verbal. The title character talks in strings of bleeps and bloops, not unlike Star Wars' R2-D2. Still, Pixar animators absolutely convey emotions through his binocular eye blinks and head tilts. If you stick with the film, which will take some effort, you will likely develop an affection for the wee tractor-wheeled fellow.

Personally, Wall-E had me from the opening musical number, Hello, Dolly!'s Put on Your Sunday Clothes. Surely the song choice is one of Pixar's fabled inside jokes, though I am at a loss as to what it might be. But it comes from Wall-E's favorite movie, seen with little pixilated images of Michael Crawford and Tommy Tune, so who are we to argue?
Wall-
Wall-E will certainly split audiences, with many embracing it as a cult classic and others bored silly by it. Personally, I cannot wait to see it again and discover more of what it contains.

Now I know how the actors feel, waiting around for the reviews after weeks and weeks of hard work rehearsing. OK, in my case it was one night of rehearsing, but still, I was giving it my all as a silent walk-on mourner in Neil LaBute's Wrecks at Mosaic Theatre in Plantation.

Why in the world? A cousin of my wife's bought it for me at a fund-raising auction for the theater and once I agreed to do it, artistic director Richard Jay Simon invited all local Equity actors to attend, encouraging them to review me, promising to post their notices on the theater's website. So far, that hasn't happened, but I have received a few reviews by e-mail.

Yes, the truly negative assessments of my dramatic skills are unlikely to be sent to me personally, so these are probably actors and playwrights trying to curry favor for the next time I am reviewing their work. Or maybe they are completely sincere. You decide:

“A seventy-five minute fun-filled laff riot, Neil LaBute's Wrecks is a challenge for any actor, and although McConnell filled the stage adequately, it was obvious the production would have fared better had Erstein been permitted his usual histrionics.
Unusual blocking left Erstein milling somewhat aimlessly upstage, faced with the difficult task of wringing pathos from myriad Greek columns. A tragedy in itself.
Roger Martin

A Report Card
“Hap Erstein:
1. Follows directions.
2. Sits quietly when asked.
3. Works nicely with others.
4. Talks quietly.
5. Walks, doesn't run.
6. Doesn't interrupt the teacher.
7. Wears his dress up clothes very well."
Grade: ***** A+
Miss (Marj) O'Neill-Butler

‘I must say, your approaching the casket at the end left not a dry eye in the house. Do I smell a Carbonell Nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play next year?”
Tony Finstrom

You can still catch Gordon McConnell's impressive work in Wrecks through June 29, but, alas, you have missed my walk-on, which lasted only one performance (a long 80 minutes). And so far, I have decided to take my wife’s advice, "Don’t quit your day job."

Last night's Tony Awards telecast was one of the best in years, a three-hour show stuffed with snippets of musical numbers from the Best Musical nominees, unnominated also-rans and shows a decade old.

To brag for a minute, I predicted 22 of the 26 awards correctly. In part, this was luck, but if you guessed South Pacific, In the Heights and August: Osage County wherever they were nominated, you had a pretty good chance of being right.

Whoopi Goldberg emceed the show and was much looser and more enjoyable than when she hosted the Oscars. A running gag had her injected into production numbers from Phantom of the Opera, Spamalot, Spring Awakening, A Chorus Line and floating down from the heavens as Mary Poppins, an appealing schtick.

With so many new musicals eager for prominent airtime on the broadcast, it was disconcerting - and a little disparaging - to start the show with the opening number from 1997's

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