by Rebecca Rosen Lum
IJ Reporter
Michael Smuin can do whatever he wants.
In the Smuin Ballet’s new program, which opened at the Cowell Theater Friday night, the former director of the San Francisco Ballet mixed moonwalking, breakdancing and tap with the tour jetes.
It’s pure show biz, and the sell-out crowd loved it.
The show began with “Starshadows,” a paean to lasting love choreographed to music by Ravel. Three couples alternated adagios under a movie-perfect starry sky. The gifted Sara Linnie Slocum, another SFB alumna, created faceted columns of light that enhanced the piece’s dreamy quality.
“Very Merrily, Verdi” offered up the most classically virtuosic of the evening’s three ballets. Particularly impressive were the impeccable Rodolphe Cassand and Claudia Alfieri, who moves with a sinuous musicality.
A planned fourth entry, “Homeless,” was scrapped when the dancer for whom it was created, Herman Piquin, was injured.
But the evening’s highlight was “To the Beatles, Revisited 2001.”
The 12-part ballet was funny, friendly and sweet.
Smuin can put on a show better than anyone: His credits include Broadway plays “Sophisticated Ladies” and “Anything Goes,” for which he won a Tony Award, and films “Rumble Fish,” “Cotton Club” and “The Joy Luck Club,” and many televised “Dance in America” forays.
The many-faceted array of dances to Beatles songs included two reworked in the style of Bach improvisations on piano, to fine effect.
The exquisite Shannon Hurlburt had all the character, swiveling grace and dance vocabulary necessary to bring off the hilarious opener, “Help.” Sure, it mixed styles. People weren’t doing the moonwalk or breakdancing when the Beatles were cutting records.
No matter. It perfectly captured the youth, that spectacularly fleeting burst of energy and bravura that made the Beatles so endearing.
Throughout, Smuin peppered the choreography with surprises, such as Amy Seiwert and Easton Smith’s tandem rowing movement in “Michelle” and Allison Jay’s pointe action atop a pile of blue stools in “Girl.”
Alas, Smuin may have strayed too far afield – even for Smuin – with a solo tap number done by Hurlburt under a blacklight. What, no strobe?
Cassand and Sarah Barber-Wilson danced with witty calypso “And I Love Her” with dash.
But the show-stoppers were Robert Cisneros and Anthony Huxley, two young boys who amazed with classical technique to spare and a voracious appetite for dancing.
In the liner notes, Smuin says his views of the Beatles have changed since he first choreographed to their tunes in the 1980s.
“I saw them as rock ‘n’ roll ruffians smashing ‘50s crew-cut conformity,” he says. This time around, he zeroed in on the wit, earthiness and poignancy that permeate the songs.
Smuin dedicated the piece to his late father, Harold Smuin.
Sandra Woodall crafted the costumes. For whatever it's worth, not since Bejart’s “Ballet du Deuxieme Siecle” have men appeared so consistently bare-chested.
Smuin said in trading the War Memorial Opera House for the Cowell, he has traded “splendor for intimacy, and emphasized personality over spectacle." It also has required him to trade an orchestra for taped music. Would that he could have it all.
Contact Rebecca Rosen Lum via email at rrosenlum@marinij.com.
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