Smuin Ballets
In 1993, Michael Smuin was approached by some fairly heavyweight supporters (who knew him from his days as co-director of SF Ballet) who suggested that he found, and they fund, his own ballet company. Michael turned to me to co-found it and be its Executive Director.
Although at the time I was consistently earning over $100k a year and this would be a nonprofit startup, I knew I could not pass up the opportunity. You do not get many chances like this in a lifetime. So I accepted without reservation and threw myself into the task, despite earning the lordly annual salary of $35,000. In fact, this was the first time in my life that I was getting only one paycheck - rather than cobbling together projects like any freelance musician - and I rather liked it!
I made a ton of cringeworthy errors - especially around the fundraising part – but my prior experience serving the wealthy class of San Francisco (playing their parties, accompanying their musical shows, etc.) came in very handy, as did my business experience, wrangling budgets and so forth. Plus I was lucky to find a few mentors who I could turn to for advice, and they really saved my butt on occasion.
So, Smuin Ballets/SF (as Michael originally named it) at first was sort of an ad hoc, pickup group. When we had an engagement (whether hired or self-presented) we would issue contracts to dancers and production people for the weeks necessary to put the show on its feet, and perform. That is, until one fateful day…
Michael called me and said “Imagine, if you will, The Christmas Ballet. Act I, The Classical Christmas and Act II, the Cool Christmas.” I got goosebumps hearing this stupendous concept, knowing a) that this played exactly to Michael’s strengths and b) that The Nutcracker functions as the main pole in the tent, financially, for every “normal” ballet company in the USA. Sure enough, when we readied the show and announced it, we pretty much swept the field in terms of publicity: the San Francisco Chronicle featured it on the cover of its Sunday Datebook, and so forth. We did blockbuster business, selling out performance after performance, and putting us on the map in no uncertain terms. I sat down with my spreadsheets and figured that, if we did reasonably well with it in future years, The Christmas Ballet would make it possible to issue full-season contracts to a company of eight dancers. Thus a proper ballet company was born.
One funny thing to relate. Michael had conceived of the company as designed to tour: eight dancers at Principal or Soloist levels, dancing to taped music, with minimal sets and costumes. OK, sounds good, but… we started with eight dancers all right, but Michael needed to have two covers (man and woman) learning the key roles to make sure we’d never have to cancel because of injury etc. Thus, we now had 10 dancers in the studio and Michael couldn’t resist choreographing for all 10 dancers! Fine, but now we needed 12 dancers in the studio, to have the obligatory covers. Rinse and repeat a couple of times, and suddenly we have 16 dancers on salary! We drew the line there, thank god.
But MIchael was doing really terrific work that connected with audiences like a house on fire. And although my job was administrative, I also had some creative input - for example, I had the idea of setting a ballet of Cyrano de Bergarac to Mozart, and he in fact did so, replete with plenty of flashy swordplay.
Anyway, we grew Smuin Ballets from zero in 1993 to $2 million a year in 2001 (when I departed): half from ticket sales and half from donations. I am deeply grateful for having had this experience and I learned more from it than I can ever describe. As of 2024 Smuin's budget is around $5 million and it is well established in the Bay Area.