Who wouldn't want to make friends with the Sufganiyot Fairy?

Like her counterpart, the Sugarplum Fairy, she's delicate and sweet, and in the guise of Katy Alaniz Rous - who plays the Sufganiyot Fairy in "The Jewish Nutcracker," which opens at the ODC Theater today - she also looks as if she's got a Yiddishe kop - some real smarts.

"Usually when people hear about a Jewish 'Nutcracker,' they say, 'How is that Jewish?' " says Rous, who also choreographed this unusual production last year. "But you know, the regular 'Nutcracker' isn't really a Christian story; it just takes place at a Christmas party."

Ties to Hanukkah

The idea for a "Nutcracker" with a Hanukkah spin came to Rous while she was reading a Hanukkah storybook to her son Amitai, now 4, and she was struck by the similarities to traditional "Nutcrackers."

"It starts at a party, and then they launch into the story of the battle between the Maccabees and the Greek soldiers," she recounts, "and it reminded me so much of being in the San Francisco Ballet 'Nutcracker' when I was growing up. I was in their production for eight years, so I was a buffoon, I was in the party scene, I was an angel, I was in the artillery, in the infantry, I was an officer, a page in the second act. Then I left and went to City Ballet and got to be a flower and a snowflake and a mirliton."

Rous realized that with very little tinkering she could reformulate the backdrop of the beloved holiday classic and create a version that not only told a Jewish story but also could draw upon her unique background in world dance to give authenticity to the various divertissement in the second act.

Set in modern-day San Francisco, the story follows young Miriam - the equivalent of Clara or Marie in other productions - from a family Hanukkah party to a dream in which she witnesses the battle fought by Judas Maccabee, the reconstruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the arrival of Jews from all over the world for the temple rededication.

Rous herself is a practitioner of more than 30 cultural dance forms, and consequently, she was keen to make the delightful variations of the second act as accurate as possible.

"I've never seen that done in a 'Nutcracker' before - it's usually an interpretation of what someone thinks a Chinese dance might be," she says, pointing her index fingers in the air in the motif typical in the Chinese divertissement of most "Nutcrackers." "What is that? But you could do an orchid flower hand," she adds, drawing her fingers into an elegant bloom.

Variety of dances

Thus the second-act dances feature a flamenco sevillanas for the Spanish variation, a belly dance for the sultry Arabian and a lively kathak for the dance of the mirlitons.

"I have hippie bohemian parents who were arts pushers," says the native San Franciscan with a broad grin, explaining that she started Afro-Brazilian when she was 8 and took flamenco classes with Rosa Montoya at the Mission Cultural Center while getting Russian character dance classes at the San Francisco Ballet School. At the School of the Arts, she took Afro-Haitian classes, and she also studied kathak under Chitresh Das at Chhandam.

"By my senior year I started realizing that this is something that not everybody does," she adds ruefully.

Although she was raised in a non-religious household, Rous was surprised to learn from her mother that she herself was Jewish just two weeks before her marriage. Since then she's deepened her connection to her Judaism, though Rous says that her husband, who is also Jewish, was the one who explained how overwhelmed he felt by all the Christmas culture. That only strengthened her resolve to create a more inclusive holiday option.

With such a wide variety of styles to cover in "The Jewish Nutcracker," Rous found a natural breeding ground at ODC's broad-based dance community and she has drawn many of her performers from the faculty and students at the school.

"I wanted to focus this year on making it part of this community and this area," she says. Rous notes that new to the production schedule this year are community workshops that have taken place in the weeks leading up to the performances in which nonprofessionals were able to sign up to learn a dance style and then take part in the show.

And there are added benefits to having a mix of dancers from all kinds of styles. This year, two dancers will share the role of the hero Judas Maccabee, the ballet-trained Grant Maser and capoerista Manolo Davila.

"It's really a nice to have dancers from all these different backgrounds working together," says Rous. "Grant is a classically trained dancer, but when he sees what Manolo is doing, he wants to try it out, so there's a nice dialogue going on.

"It turns out that a jinga in capoeira and a balancé in ballet are really not all that different," she adds with a sly smile.

The Jewish Nutcracker, a Maccabee Celebration: World Dance Fusion. Today.-Sun. ODC Theater, 3153 17th St., S.F. $15-$25. (415) 863-9834. jewishnutcracker.com.