“Once More, with Feeling” is the seventh episode of the sixth season of television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the only episode performed as a musical. It aired on November, 6 2001. As the series progresses, the characters continue to struggle with adulthood, relationships and their place in the struggle against evil, as individuals and as member of a group. Joss Whedon, heavily influenced by composers like Stephen Sondheim, uses standard tropes of the musical theater genre and subverts others in this musical episode. Like the composer he so admires, Whedon uses all of his musical numbers to advance the plot and reveal deeper truths about each of the characters. In “Once More, with Feeling,” Whedon crafts an episode of television that is unlike any other, and is one of the most important episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
This presentation will explore the way “Once More, with Feeling” emphasizes the themes of community/individuality, heroism, honesty and relationships present throughout the series, using devices found in the musical comedy genre. The struggles and challenges of the actors working together in performing the musical mirror the struggles of the characters in their community and as individuals. While musical comedies often feature happy endings and tidy resolutions, “Once More, with Feeling” uses the musical comedy form to achieve the opposite result. While critics of the musical comedy genre find it “not realistic,” Whedon uses a combination of pastiche and parody to force the characters to reach a new level of honesty and reality through singing and dancing. Moreover, this presentation will explore the way the episode takes a form that could create distance from the audience, and instead invites the audience to engage with “Once More, with Feeling” in a direct way.
About the presenterGail D. Rosen
Gail D. Rosen is an Associate Teaching Professor at Drexel University in the Department of English and Philosophy. She teaches Our Vampire, Ourselves, Literature and the Broadway Musical, Mythology, Law and Literature and courses in the first year writing sequence. In 2013 she published Now Playing: Learning Mythology through Film. Her essay “Whedon’s Women and the Law: Parallels from Slayers to S.H.I.E.L.D.” was published in The Comics of Joss Whedon: Critical Essays in June 2015.