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:: THEY SING, THEY DANCE, THEY SLAY! ::

Joss Whedon and his cast tell Judy Sloane about the making of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's musical episode...

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TWO SEASONS AGO, BUFFY the Vampire Slayer's creator Joss Whedon wrote a ground-breaking episode entitled Hush, in which a full twenty minutes was played out in complete silence. The following year, he tried something which was the exact opposite: The Body, an episode which was entirely lacking in background tones. This year, the innovative instalment continues the theme: it's a musical called Once More, With Feeling.

Musical episodes are'nt as rare as they once were, with LEXX and Xena having already done them, but Whedon has his own ideas on how to make Buffy's version stand-out. "It was important that it was not a stunt," he insists. "A lot of shows do musical numbers, but I felt if we ever did a musical it would have to be a real musical - it would have to be original. It could'nt be, 'Let's do a scene and then let's stop and sing an oldie,' because those drive me crazy. That's not a musical, that's a variety show. It would have to be a story that was based in song, where the big story points and the big emotional moments were in the songs."

Whedon accomplished this feat by penning an episode in which a musical demon, who dresses like a lounge singer, is summoned to Sunnydale and forces Buffy and her friends to reveal their most private secrets to one another - in song. All 14 songs were composed by Whedon, and sung by the cast members themselves. "I really tried very hard to tell the story in the songs," says Joss. "Sometimes the songs are commenting on the action, sometimes they are the action; sometimes they're emotional insights into the characters, and where they're going and where they realize they have to go. The point about singing is that you say things you could never actually say. A song builds in a character and then it bursts forth. The problem they're having is the demon has turned their world into a musical and they keep singing things that they didn't want to say. So it's tearing them apart. They keep finding out things they didn't want to know because nobody can shut up."

Such an enormous undertaking has been in Whedon's mind for years, as he acknowledges. "I've always wanted to do a musical, and Buffy is so much like a musical anyway, with its heart on its sleeve - half the time you feel like they're going to burst into song any minute, but they don't. And we said, 'This time they will!'"

Throughout the show's six seasons, Whedon has held gatherings at his home for the cast, which have given him a good idea of what he could expect from his team. "We do Shakespearean readings at Joss' every few weeks," says Amber Benson. "Afterwards it always degenerates into lots of singing and dancing and making fun of ourselves. Joss will do a Grateful Dead song and I'll sing along, so he knew I could sing and he knew Tony could sing. And he took the leap of faith that we would all go for a musical- and we did."

Although Whedon realized that several cast members could carry a tune, he confesses the fact that it turned out they could all sing was "lucky. I got everyone to give me their vocal ranges before I left on vacation. I knew James [Marsters'] style and how that meshed with Spike's style. I knew that Amber was going to get the big love ballad, because I knew she had that kind of voice. I knew Michelle [Trachtenberg] was going to do some dancing, because she loves to dance. I really wrote the whole story according to what they could or wanted to do."

Whedon took last summer off to write the musical he always dreamt of producing and directing. "It's not the first time that I've ever written songs, but it's the first time I've ever written songs that anybody's heard except my wife," he laughs. "I came back with this script and this score that I had written, and they embraced it pretty amazingly. The cast had to work after hours doing dance rehearsals, singing, doing singing lessons, training. None of them are professional singers, except for Tony. [Stewart Head] who sung on the stage in London. Some of them were terrified, some of them were 'no problem,' and everybody has done just amazing work."

Among the performers who weren't thrilled with Whedon's musical plans was Alyson Hannigan. "I was pretty much petrified," she states honestly. "I tried to convince Joss not to do it. I said, I could have laryngitis, right?' But as always, he was correct. They can do wonders with the little music-making machine. My singing was not as terrible as I thought. But I'm still not quitting my day job! I asked him to give me as little singing as possible."

The one cast member who welcomed the idea with open arms was Nicholas Brendon. "We heard about it last year and I was excited about it. I've never really sung or danced before, but I hadn't acted before I did the show either. I don't question Joss. He said, 'We are going to do a musical, and it's going to be the best thing ever.' So I didn't think it was going to be like Cop Rock [a very unsuccessful musical TV series from the usually reliable Stephen Bochco, creator of NYPD Blue]. I knew it was going to be like butter, and it was all going to make sense. It's got a good flow, and all the songs mean something."

James Marsters, who sings in a rock group, admits that even he was "terrified" when the idea of the musical was brought up. "Joss writes very confusing music," he acknowledges. "He's like Stephen Sondheim, in which to say that the note you are searching for is not necessarily contained in the cord that's being played - the note will be given to you in the next phrase, which is very Sondheim-ist. It's very complicated and it's very demanding on the singer."

But the actor relates that the hardest thing for him to do in the show was not the singing, it was "the lip-synching. You get into it and you start feeling it and you have to remember that there's a very technical aspect of having to get the lips and the breath to move at a very certain time. It was more like dancing with your mouth than it was acting."

And of Whedon's creative brilliance, Marsters recognizes, "What Joss did is that he structured it so a lot of the plot points of the season come to a climax in this episode, so it works perfectly and makes sense. Musicals are an American invention and, at their best, they take you to a point where you can't go any further with words only. You have to express yourself with music. If it works it lifts you out of your seat, and if it doesn't work - it's cheesy."

As for Amber Benson, her favorite scene in the episode is when she's singing to Willow in their bedroom and the latter weaves a magic spell, raising Tara off the bed. "It was fun because it was just Alyson, me and the crew. I'm on this thing on the bed and it's lifting me up - we were all cracking up!"

The most challenging aspect of doing the episode for Benson was "the dancing. I hadn't danced in a long time. When I was a little kid, I'd do tap dancing, but never lyrical dancing. And trying to dance and sing at the same time was difficult." In closing, Whedon reflects on the episode, saying, "In a weird way I think of it as the sequel to Hush, because Hush was all about how you start communicating when you stop talking, how language gets in the way of real communication, and this is sort of the same thing. They stop talking. They start singing. They start communicating but they don't necessarily want to hear everything that they have to say."

"It's the hardest thing I've ever done," he continues. "I've never written an entire score before. I can't really play an instrument, so it was a new challenge and I always need a new challenge. As James Marsters said, 'You know, if we're not absolutely scared out of our wits at least once a year, we're not working hard enough.'"

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