Ben Stevenson

It was a sad opening at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Tuesday. The Joffrey Ballet was returning to its coastal home away from home for the first time since the death of Robert Joffrey. There was nothing funereal, however, about the programming, nothing solemn about the dancing. The Joffrey company has always prided itself on youthful high spirits, and, in that surface respect, the performance suggested business as usual.

The magical Joffrey Ballet, the New York company that set up another shop in 1983 at the Los Angeles Music Center, may be finding a second home within its second home, if the warmth of Orange County audience response is any indication. And with good reason.

The dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet may be superbly trained in elegance of placement and refinement of execution. But, helas, they've clearly never learned to survive on the road.

They Vanted to Party: Dracula lovers and supporters of KCET public television heralded Tuesday night's premiere of Houston Ballet's "Dracula" with a gala benefit dinner, show and cast party at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion hosted by the KCET board of directors and the station's Women's Council. A record $520,000 was raised to support programming and educational ventures.

Tony Award-winning actor, singer and tap dancer extraordinaire Gregory Hines is having no problem adjusting to life on a sitcom. "It's a breeze," the 51-year-old Hines says enthusiastically. Hines, who starred on Broadway in the musicals "Jelly's Last Jam" and "Sophisticated Ladies" and in such films as "Running Scared" and "Waiting to Exhale," headlines "The Gregory Hines Show,' which premiered last week on CBS.

The good news about Ben Stevenson's "Cinderella" is that it lasts only two hours and 20 minutes. The other good news is . . . . Well, there isn't much other good news. Several American Ballet Theatre dancers did what they could to inject life into this stillborn work over the weekend at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. But there's only so much they could add when there is hardly any choreography. People move onstage to music, of course, and there are recognizable ballet steps and combinations.

CBS tonight delivers three series that together are a metaphor for the new season: decent, but not exciting. That interesting actor David Caruso returns to TV as a federal prosecutor in a new series whose writers should be tried for nonsupport. Despite weak scripts, however, Caruso's magnetic portrayal of this pristine hero alone makes initial "Michael Hayes" episodes watchable.

7:30pm Dance The only imported "Nutcracker" on local stages this season, the familiar Moscow Classical Ballet edition returns with its unusual combination of Christmas-card settings and competition-style bravura. As choreographed by company directors Natalia Kasatkina and Vladimir Vasilyov (with borrowings from the same Vainonen version danced by the Kirov Ballet), this "Nutcracker" gives nearly everyone showpiece opportunities, from little Fritz to old Drosselmeyer.

To the present generation of fans and fauns, ballet is all about men. It is an art predicated on high-flying muscular heroes, preferably Russian. It wasn't always like that. Ballet used to be the province of the ballerina, the eternally ethereal spirit in a white tutu. Ballet, just a few decades ago, didn't mean Nureyev or Baryshnikov. It meant Markova or Ulanova or Danilova or Alonso. . . . It meant Margot Fonteyn. The name remains magical for many of us.

The undead no longer walk among us--they dance. Restlessly, endlessly, purposelessly they dance, in choreography without distinction to music without a pulse. Every hour or so they claim a new victim, which initiates an orgy of over-the-top pantomime and flamboyant stagecraft. Then it's back to the dancing: a wan, dim, never-ceasing classical hell-on-earth set amid the bat-gargoyles and bat-tapestries and blood-red swag curtains the undead call home.