The Other Christmas Ballet.

San Francisco choreographer Michael Smuin's dance works remind us that unembarrassed theatricality earns both loyal fans and bitter enemies.

San Francisco. long known as a haven of alternative styles, is the perfect home for Smuin Ballets/SF and The Christmas Ballet. Michael Smuin's picturesque holiday confection returns this month to Yerba Buena Gardens in all its unassuming glory. It is definitely not The Nutcracker, even if it, too, wants to please everyone gig jaded critics. In truth, The Christmas Ballet wants to do nothing but make dance lovers of all ages smile. It succeeds. It turned out to be a sleeper, the beginning of a holiday tradition in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The piece has an unlikely mix of angelic carolers, tap-dancing Christmas trees, sexy vamps, swaggering cowboys, undulating hula girls, courting Yeshiva students, a shark right out of Jaws, and a troupe of dancers whose every move tells a story. Music ranges from Bach's Maginificat to Eartha Kitt's "Santa Baby." It is decidedly not The Nutcracker: it is definitely too much: but it works. It is basic fare for Smuin Ballets/SF, San Francisco's youngest, funkiest ballet company.

"I had been wanting to do The Christmas Ballet for so long," Smuin recalled with the kind of glee Mickey and Judy exuded when they were about to put on a show and save the day at MGM. "All this music had been piling up, all these carols that just begged to be danced to. In a way, I have to say I am very lucky at this stage in my life that I can pick and choose what I do."

The choices of this sixty-one-year-old dancemaker are not dull. In recent seasons, Smuin, former director of San Francisco Ballet and principal choreographer of American Ballet Theatre, has created a string of major new ballets, including One Step Forward to Bach, Frankie and Johnny, and Suenos Latinos for Smuin Ballets/SF. He also choreographed Wagner's Tannhauser and Britten's Death in Venice for the San Francisco Opera. created dance sequences for the Keanu Reeves film. A Walk in the Clouds, and choreographed the still-unreleased film version of The Fantasticks, as well as the hit Return of the Jedi: Special Edition using Smuin Ballets/SF dancers.

While working on The Christmas Ballet. Smuin also dashed off a Nutcracker on Ice for San Franciscan skaters Brian Boitano and Oksana Baiul and then found time to choreograph Jerry Herman's musical Mack and Mabel on London's West End. which went on to win the London Evening Standard Award for Best Musical of 1995.

Smuin has done all right for a cowboy from Montana who had to fight hard to make it into show business. "Our nearest neighbors when I was growing up were twenty-five miles away," Smuin recalls. "We didn't see any other people except at church."

After studying dance and music at the University of Montana, Smuin found a home in San Francisco when he became a principal dancer with the country's oldest ballet company. He left San Francisco to dance on Broadway, became a principal dancer and then choreographer with ABT in New York City, and then returned to San Francisco Ballet as its codirector from 1973 to 1985. His career cannot be called uneventful. Smuin is unusual among classical choreographers in having won the Tony, Emmy, Drama Desk, and Evening Standard awards. He has choreographed Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, but also the movies Rumble Fish, Dracula, and The Cotton Club, as well as Broadway shows ranging from the legendary bomb Shogun to the megahits Sophisticated Ladies and Anything Goes.

The Christmas Ballet, revised and revamped for its San Francisco homecoming this month, is neatly divided into what Smuin terms classical and "cool" halves. The first is mostly en pointe, the second mostly not. Both display narrative values, despite Smuin's intention to stay away from a specific Christmas story. "I just wanted to avoid doing another Nutcracker," he said. "I always start with the music, and all movement comes from that."

It is tree that his work with San Francisco Ballet and beyond has been marked by a strong musical sense, especially in duets, by a natural and sensual appropriation of the off-balance motion of bodies coming together. Strong partnering is what such wildly disparate Smuin dances as Stravinsky Piano Pieces and The Blue Angel have in common.

"But I guess I always gravitate toward a story," Smuin adds. His handpicked company, an extraordinarily attractive and vivacious troupe, cannot help projecting a strong personality even in rehearsal. "That's true of all good dancers," said Smuin. "They can't help telling a story when they move onstage. They often end up dictating the stories I tell in a dance."

Those stories tend to be unabashedly populist, drenched in witty dramatic values, and often jazzily over the top. While it takes solid classical technique to bring to life a Smuin ballet, a dash of Broadway or Hollywood oomph is also in order. When the leggy Celia Fushille-Burke struts onto the stage in The Christmas Ballet wearing what Smuin calls "the longest feather boa in theater history," it's easy to imagine that this is the sort of dance Cyd Charisse would have loved. And Fushille-Burke dancing Smuin is the sort of lady who could make one forget Charisse.

Other memorable crowd-pleasing, critic-proof examples abound in the Smuin Ballet repertory: Last season's new Pinocchio, a gem of a children's ballet, boasted techniques from classic kabuki to vaudeville schtick, a flying Blue Fairy, a boat on the high seas, dancing animals and a humongous boy-eating whale. The Pinocchio score included a new song by company friend Francis Ford Coppola. Smuin's 1997 Carmina Burana, a ballet truly innocent of cant and trends, grows more powerful with every viewing in its portrayal of an outsider's loneliness and a community's rituals.

Cyrano, also from 1997, which Smuin calls "about as subtle as I will ever get," succeeds in translating the original play's poetry into what must count as a breakthrough in Smuin's own art of partnering. It is also a tribute to the potency of Smuin's pantomime that the pace in Cyrano never lets up even when stillness rules. The Blue Angel, premiered in 1998, may not have been as saucy as expected, but just the picture of Fushille-Burke's Lola Lola straddling a silver moon would be reason enough to revive the piece. Songs of the Auvergne (1999), the loveliest and tenderest of Smuin's creations for this company, may be a reminder that the American storyteller does not always need to tell a story; it also calls up devastating feelings of community as potent as does, say, Paul Taylor's Eventide or Mark Morris's L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato.

The unembarrassed theatricality of Smuin's dances has earned him loyal fans, captivated by his show-biz savvy, and bitter enemies. The San Francisco's ballet wars may eventually recede into local lore, but they have raged furiously since the nasty struggle that forced Smuin out of the company in 1984. In what all sides now concede was not the best management move, San Francisco Ballet kept Smuin as resident choreographer even as Helgi Tomasson--who had nothing whatsoever to do with Smuin's being fired as company director--arrived to lead the company. In 1986, San Francisco Ballet bought out Smuin's contract. "Instead of getting a new ballet from me," Smuin said, "they paid me off."

Far from letting bygones be bygones, Smuin was quite public in letting it be known that he thought the new regime was, in his words, "boring." In 1988, after Smuin danced his way onstage to accept the Tony Award for Cole Porter's Anything Goes on Broadway, his first words on national television were, "This is such sweet revenge."

Vengeful or not, the man is driven. And not a few people believe that revenge is at least one of the motives behind the founding of Smuin Ballets/SF six years ago. At least one critic suggested that the company's birth signaled more that Smuin had something to prove than that he had something to say. Still, a little mellowing may be in the works. Or at least some refocusing of energies. One of the happier spectacles in the Bay Area's uniquely rambunctious dance scene in the last few seasons has been the artistic growth of both Smuin Ballets/SF, under its founder's guidance, and San Francisco Ballet, with Tomasson at the helm. They are apples and oranges, and there is room for both.

Evelyn Cisneros, the beloved San Francisco Ballet star who retired last year after a successful career with both Smuin and Tomasson, recalls, "The company was more mature with Michael. The dancers were more individual artists: Michael really liked to bring out the individuality in the dancers."

"That's where I trust Michael, of course," said Fushille-Burke, current prima ballerina and associate artistic director of Smuin Ballets/SF. "He has a gift for knowing what a dancer's own gifts are, for bringing them out and never discounting the theatricality of movement. Michael brings everything in his background to every new ballet. You know there's a reason he's won a Tony, an Emmy, all those other awards. He is fearless, and it shows."

Fushille-Burke does not believe that competition with the past plays a big part in Smuin's recent choreography. "What is great about working with Michael now," she said, "is that he does not have to prove himself: The culmination of his creative life is happening right now, when he is doing exactly what he wants to do and creating dances to please himself." That Smuin and his dancers are also pleasing a fast-growing audience is an added gift to the local dance scene. In a world where ballet companies fold as a matter of course, the popular and critical success of Smuin Ballets/SF --the Yerba Buena engagements are routinely sold out--must count as good news.

Perhaps the most surprising news is that, for a small company, Smuin Ballets/SF has acquired an impressive body of dances in six years--no small feat. And it is, without doubt, one of the country's most entertaining, original ballet troupes.

Or so audiences think. The Christmas Ballet has become a Bay Area dance phenomenon. It is routinely the first--and often the only--holiday fare to sell out, and this in a community that hosts major Nutcracker productions by San Francisco Ballet, Oakland Ballet, and San Jose Cleveland Ballet as well as Morris's Hard Nut across the Bay Bridge in Berkeley.

While some critics still insist that Smuin, his populist choreography, and the very existence of his company somehow lower the tone of San Francisco dance, many others remain blissfully unfazed by the elite's judgments and simply vote at the box office. A rarity among dance companies, Smuin Ballets/SF actually makes it mostly on ticket sales. And its books are in the black.

"I have never understood why some people think you can't do both," says Smuin, "I mean, make good, challenging ballet that is also terrific entertainment. Something that will make audiences come back for more. That is what we do. We depend on box office more than most companies and--you know what?--that's fine."

Pinocchio has so far proved to be the Smuin ballet for everyone, including his severest critics. But he still seems intent on sending eyebrows flying north: Last month, in the November Yerba Buena run before the return of The Christmas Ballet, the company repertory included the premiere of Smuin's Les Noces alongside the return of his Songs of the Auvergne.

In the spring, he will put his dancers through his Medea, which has not been seen here since 1979 and is sure to revive the discussion of the banishment of his choreography from San Francisco Ballet. The Smuin Ballets/SF current season also promises Starshadows, One Step Forward to Bach, the enigmatic Shinju, created for SFB in 1975, Suenos Latinos, and Pinocchio.

Does Smuin mind the partisanship that seems to follow his steps? His own clipped and colorful answer to critics is unprintable, but Smuin's general attitude can be summarized as one of disarming tolerance: "You are never, ever going to make everyone happy, so the best you can do is start by making yourself and your dancers happy. Then you go from there."

Octavio Roca, a contributing editor of Dance Magazine, is the dance critic of the San Francisco Chronicle.