Smuin's seasonal show has shaky start
By Mary Ellen Hunt
TIMES CORRESPONDENT

Smuin Ballet kicked off the chilly holiday season with a post-Thanksgiving run of "The Christmas Ballet" Friday night at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.

The hard-working and ubiquitous troupe returned this season sporting a number of new faces, many of them familiar to East Bay dance-goers. For newcomers to Smuin Ballet, the company's annual "Christmas Ballet" made for some pleasantly diverting entertainment mixed in with the excitement of Michael Smuin's flamboyant championship ballroom dancing moves. However, if you were a fan of the company you might have thrown your program insert into the aisle in despair, since it was chock full of errors, generally listing the wrong performers and putting the pieces in the wrong order -- even leaving out some dancers and at least one of the numbers. This reviewer spent half the evening trying to unravel the casting and program changes, which were not announced prior to the show.

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Janice Berman, Special to The Chronicle

"I don't want Mountain View to feel like we're giving them a second- class show," Michael Smuin said Wednesday night in the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts' lobby. Though Smuin Ballet has been dancing in Silicon Valley almost since its inception nine years ago, Smuin's "The Christmas Ballet" tends to remain under the radar until its opening in San Francisco, where it will run from Wednesday through Dec. 28 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater.

Now, a few minutes before show time, Smuin fretted about what the Mountain View audience wouldn't see because of the intimate-scale theater's technical limitations: "You can't fly anything in. You can't use projections. There's no front scrim. But I get mail every year: 'Please keep coming to Mountain View.' "