The hills are alive with the sound of ... vampire slaying!

An extraordinary episode of "Buffy" takes the American movie musical to places it's never been before.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Nov. 7, 2001 | Even those of us who love musicals have to recognize that they often demand taking a leap of faith: Sometimes when a segue from dialogue to song doesn't feel natural or believable, we look the other way for an instant until we can get swept back into the rhythm of the music and the action. And then there's the problem of hokey expository dialogue clumped around the music. Pauline Kael nailed it in her review of the film version of Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music": "You know what you're in for near the beginning when the hero ... is greeted with 'Good afternoon, Lawyer Egerman.'"

How can it be, then, that a special musical episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" -- an episode that ran some eight minutes over the show's regular runtime, potentially causing riots across the land among fans who didn't set their VCRs to catch the overhang -- should avoid every traditional pratfall of the genre? The show's creator, producer and chief writer, Joss Whedon, wrote and produced the music. The songs were only half-memorable at best, and the singing ability of the show's regular cast ranged only from the fairly good to the not so great.

But picking apart the technicalities of this "Buffy" episode -- its title was "Once More, With Feeling" -- is the best way to miss the point of how beautifully it worked, how gracefully paced, clever and affecting it was. For one thing, Whedon figured out how to make the music a seamless part of the action, by working it into the plot as a joke.

Here's the story: Sunnydale has been invaded by a demon who makes everyone burst into song and dance at the slightest provocation, as Buffy discovers when she looks outside on a sunny morning and sees a phalanx of ordinary citizens prancing and high-kicking in perfect formation, swirling their just-retrieved dry-cleaning about them like bullfighters' capes. ("They got the mustard out!" a chubby, gleeful baritone sings by way of explanation.)

The joke is brilliant because it frees even people who hate musicals to settle into the story without getting hung up on the genre's conventions. I remember a friend saying to me in the fourth grade, "Musicals are so unrealistic! Nobody bursts into song like that!" Whedon addresses that criticism directly instead of just dismissing it.

But "Once More with Feeling" works mostly because the musical numbers are keyed right into the heartbeat of the show, a show whose mythology, by now, in the midst of the sixth season, is so rich and deliciously Byzantine that you could almost design a college course around it. There was joy and lightness in "Once More with Feeling," particularly the sequence where Tara (Amber Benson) and Willow (Alyson Hannigan), the show's Wiccan lesbian lovers, cavort in an almost insanely sunny park, twirling about in medieval-looking frocks. Tara sings of her love for Willow, particularly her amazement that anyone could open her so completely to the beauty of the world; the scene ends in the couple's bedroom, with Tara gently levitating inches above the bed as Willow hovers somewhere just below the frame, one of the best metaphors for the bliss of oral sex I've seen on any screen, small or large.

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