The Emmy-winning series was already deep into its seven-season run when creator Joss Whedon came up with perhaps his most ambitious idea yet: a musical episode. The result was Buffy season 6 episode 7, "Once More, With Feeling," which remains a high point for the show and a frequent contender for best episode ever among diehard fans. The brilliance of this 50-minute spectacle is how it combines the two, using a demon's curse that forces everyone in the town of Sunnydale to sing and dance as if they were in a Broadway play to push the show's overarching plot forward in numerous ways.
The best example of this may be the relationship between Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Spike (James Marsters). The two had already been engaging in a toxic will-they-won't-they relationship for one season, and Spike takes the opportunity to get some big emotions off his chest while channeling Billy Idol in one of the musical’s best songs. At the end of the episode, when the curse is lifted but the revealed emotions still remain, Buffy and Spike share their first real kiss.
Spoiler alert: their relationship does not go well. But we're not here to relitigate "Spuffy." We're here to celebrate "Once More, With Feeling." To do so, I called up Marsters to recount the tale behind Buffy's iconic musical, from the terrifying moment he first found out about it to the episode's legacy 25 years later. Below, Polygon presents the behind-the-scenes story of "Once More, With Feeling" in the words of its breakout star.
You might think Joss Whedon would gather his cast to tell them they were about to make a musical. According to Marsters, he shared the news in a more abrupt way. James Marsters: Instead of delivering the new script for the next episode, we were given a cassette tape with Joss singing the songs of the show and plunking them out on the piano.
And whereas Joss is an enormously gifted writer and director and producer, as a singer he wasn't quite up to the material. As a piano player, he's fine, but it didn't sound like it was gonna work. I'm a punk rocker, and I was like, “What the F is this?” I remember ripping the cassette tape out of the deck in my trailer and walking out into the bright sunshine and squinting and holding up this cassette tape, and everybody else was doing the same thing, opening their doors and just going, “What the fuck?
Did you just listen to this? What's going on here?” It just set off this deep panic as we discovered that we were going to be asked to suddenly do a musical. While a few of the cast members, including Marsters and Anthony Head (Giles) had professional singing experience, most did not.
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