"Буффи қабаттағы музыкалық саяхат"

"Once More, with Feeling" is the seventh episode of the sixth season of the supernatural drama television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and the only one in the series performed as a musical. It was written and directed by series creator Joss Whedon and originally aired on UPN in the United States on November 6, 2001. "Once More, with Feeling" explores changes in the relationships of the main characters, using the plot device that a demon—credited as "Sweet" but unnamed in the episode—compels the people of Sunnydale to break into song at random moments to express hidden truths. The title of the episode comes from a line sung by Sweet; once the characters have revealed their truths and face the consequences of hearing each other's secrets, he challenges them to "say you're happy now, once more, with feeling". All of the regular cast performed their own vocals, although two actors were given minimal singing at their request. "Once More, with Feeling" is the most technically complex episode in the series, as extra voice and dance training for the cast was interspersed with the production of four other Buffy episodes. It was Whedon's first attempt at writing music, and different styles—from 1950s sitcom theme music to rock opera—express the characters' secrets in specific ways. The episode was critically well–received upon airing, specifically for containing the humor and wit to which fans had become accustomed. The musical format allowed characters to stay true to their natures while they struggled to overcome deceit and miscommunication, fitting with the sixth season's themes of growing up and facing adult responsibilities. It is considered one of the most effective and popular episodes of the series, and—prior to a financial dispute in 2007—was shown in theaters with the audience invited to sing along.

Throughout the series Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), in her role as the Vampire Slayer, is assisted by her close friends, who refer to themselves as the "Scooby Gang". These include Xander Harris (Nicholas Brendon), a young man without particular strengths or talents, but devoted to Buffy and her calling, and Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan), a young woman who has grown from a shy but gifted student into a strong woman and powerful user of magic. They are mentored by Buffy's "Watcher", Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), a paternal figure since the first season, when Buffy moved to Sunnydale after her parents' divorce. Xander is engaged to Anya Jenkins (Emma Caulfield), a former vengeance demon who has become human. They have struggled with disclosing their engagement to the rest of the group and individually doubt their impending marriage. Buffy's former nemesis is Spike (James Marsters), a vampire. In the fourth season The Initiative, a secret military organization whose mission is to evaluate and eliminate demonic beings, rendered Spike harmless by implanting a microchip in his head that causes him intense pain when he attacks humans. However, the chip does not affect him when he harms demons and he now often fights on Buffy's side, after at first fighting just for the pleasure of brawling. His motivations changed when, in the fifth season, Spike realized he had fallen in love with Buffy. She initially rejected him, but just before her death they had begun to form a friendship of sorts. She has been confiding in him; prior to this episode, he is the only one to whom Buffy has revealed that she was in heaven.

When Buffy is on patrol, she laments in song about how uninspired her life has become ("Going Through the Motions"). The next morning at the Magic Box, the gang reveal that they also sang that evening. Led by Giles, the gang theorizes about the cause of the singing; they sense no immediate danger but agree that by working together they can overcome anything ("I've Got a Theory"/"Bunnies"/"If We're Together"). Buffy learns that the whole town is affected when she looks outside the shop to see a large group (led by series writer and producer David Fury) singing and dancing about how a dry cleaning service got their stains out ("The Mustard"). Tara and Willow leave to "research" at home, but dally along the way while Tara muses about how much Willow has improved her life ("Under Your Spell"). The next morning, Xander and Anya perform a duet about their secret annoyances with each other and their respective doubts about their impending marriage ("I'll Never Tell"). They realize that the songs are bringing out hidden secrets, and later insist to Giles that something evil is to blame. As they argue, they walk past a woman (series writer and producer Marti Noxon) protesting a parking ticket ("The Parking Ticket"). That evening, Buffy visits Spike, who angrily tells Buffy to leave him alone if she will not love him ("Rest in Peace"). Dawn tells Tara she is glad that Tara and Willow have made up after their argument. Since Tara has no recollection of an argument, she suspects that Willow has used magic to alter her memory. She goes to the Magic Box to consult a book, leaving Dawn alone. Dawn, contemplating a collection of objects that she has stolen, including the charm that summoned Sweet, starts to bemoan that no one seems to notice her ("Dawn's Lament"), but is soon seized by a group of minions. They take Dawn to The Bronze, where her attempt to escape transforms into an interpretive dance with them ("Dawn's Ballet") before she meets Sweet (Hinton Battle), a zoot suit wearing, tap dancing, singing demon. He tells Dawn that he has come to Sunnydale in response to her "invocation", and he will take her to his dimension to make her his bride when his visit is complete but when Dawn reveals that her sister is the Slayer, he sends his minions to challenge her to rescue Dawn ("What You Feel"). At the Magic Box, Giles recognizes that he must stand aside if Buffy is to face her responsibilities in caring for Dawn instead of relying on him ("Standing") and Tara finds a picture of the Lethe’s bramble flower Willow used to cast a spell on her in a book of magic. Giles and Tara separately resolve to leave the people they love, respectively Buffy and Willow — Giles wants to leave Buffy for her own good, while Tara wants to leave Willow because she has become horrified by Willow's magical manipulation of their relationship ("Under Your Spell"/"Standing" (reprise)). When one of Sweet's minions tells Buffy about Sweet holding Dawn at The Bronze, Giles forbids the gang to assist her, so she goes alone, despite having no will to do so; eventually Giles and the Scoobies change their minds and leave to catch up. Although Spike initially thinks that things would be better for him if Buffy was dead, he also changes his mind and decides to help Buffy; Sweet opines that Buffy is drawn to danger ("Walk Through the Fire"). Meeting Sweet at The Bronze, Buffy offers a deal to Sweet: she will take her sister's place if she cannot kill him. When asked by Sweet what she thinks about life, Buffy gives her pessimistic take on its meaning ("Something to Sing About"). When the others arrive, she divulges that Willow took her from heaven, and Willow reacts with horror at realizing what she has done. Upon divulging this truth, Buffy gives up on singing and dances so frenetically that she begins to smoke — on the verge of combusting as Sweet's other victims have been shown to do — until Spike stops her, telling her that the only way to go forward is to just keep living her life. Xander then reveals that he, not Dawn, invoked Sweet, hoping for a musical "happy ending" for his marriage plans and unaware of the demon's deadly nature. Sweet, after releasing Xander from the obligation to be Sweet's "bride", tells the group how much fun they have been ("What You Feel" (reprise)) and disappears. The Scoobies realize that their relationships have been changed irreversibly by the secrets revealed in their songs ("Where Do We Go from Here?"). Spike leaves The Bronze, but Buffy follows him out, and they kiss ("Coda").

Joss Whedon had wanted to make a musical episode since the start of the series. This desire was heightened during the fifth season when he hosted a Shakespeare reading at his house, to which the cast was invited. They began drinking and singing, demonstrating to Whedon that certain cast members had musical talents. When he returned after the end of the fifth season, he presented Davies with a script and CD, complete with notated and orchestrated music, which Davies found "mind boggling". The actors were initially bewildered; in 2012, James Marsters commented that "it's obvious now that they were good songs but the thing was Joss and his wife Kai, they don't sing very well. And they don't play piano very well. The songs sounded really cheesy and horrible We were saying, 'Joss, you're ruining our careers.'" Preparing for the episode was physically difficult for some of the cast members, most of whom had little experience singing and dancing. They spent three months in voice training.|group="note" Two choreographers worked with Whedon and the cast on dance sequences. Michelle Trachtenberg (Dawn), who is trained in ballet, requested a dance sequence in lieu of a significant singing part, Davies was so impressed with Hinton Battle's performance on Broadway in The Wiz that he asked Battle to play the demon Sweet. Battle, a three time Tony winner, wore prosthetic make up for the first time to give him a demonic red face. Sweet was portrayed as "slick", smooth and stylish; in contrast, most demons on the series were designed to be crude and ugly. different lighting to bring out the sets more vibrantly, and long takes for shooting—including a complicated shot with a full conversation, a song, and two choreographed dances that took 21 attempts to get right. These were designed to give viewers all the clues they needed to establish all the nuances of the relationships between characters. Critics hailed the episode as successful in telling a complex story about all the characters in a unique way, while retaining the series' effective elements of writing and character development. Throughout the show—as in the rest of the series—the characters self consciously address their own dialogue and actions. Anya describes her own duet "I'll Never Tell" as "a retro pastiche that's never gonna be a breakaway pop hit". With a characteristic dry demeanor, Giles explains that he overheard the information about Sunnydale residents spontaneously combusting as he was eavesdropping upon the police taking "witness arias". In her opening number, "Going Through the Motions", Buffy sings that she feels as though she is playing a part: "nothing here is real, nothing here is right". The song introduces the character's emotional state but also removes the barrier between the actor and the audience, as Gellar the actor portrays Buffy, who feels she is merely playing the part of the Slayer. This hints to the audience that the episode's musical format is strange to the actors and characters. Whedon included self conscious dialogue and references about the characters being in a musical and showed their reluctance toward song and dance, so that the audience would feel more comfortable with the improbability of such a thing happening on the show. The dynamic nature of the characters was a unique element of writing in the series at the time. Once they were established in the twelve episodes of the first season, characters began to change and relationships were developed in the second. This continued through the series to the point of unpredictability that sometimes became unsettling to fans. Buffy essayist Marguerite Krause asserts that the monsters and demons faced by the Scoobies are thin symbolism for the show's true focus: relationships and how to maintain or ruin them. Common among most of these relationships—romantic, platonic, and familial—is, according to Krause, a "failure to communicate, lack of trust, [and the] inability to envision or create a viable future". Miscommunication is worsened or sustained through multiple episodes and seasons, leading to overwhelming misunderstanding and critical turning points for the characters, some of whom do not recover. "Once More, with Feeling" propelled the story arc for season six by allowing characters to confess previously taboo issues to themselves and each other. Whedon commented that he was "obsessive about progressing a plot in a song, about saying things we haven't said", comparing the musical theater format to the fourth season episode "Hush", in which characters begin communicating when they stop talking. The consequences in the episode of concealing truth, spontaneous combustion, is an allusion to Bleak House by Charles Dickens—of whom Whedon is a fan—where characters also face immolation for being deceitful. For Buffy, however, truth is slow in coming, as she continues to lie to the Scoobies, claiming to forget what she sang about in the graveyard during "Going Through the Motions". Buffy continues her charade in the chorus number "If We're Together", beginning the song by persuading others to join in one by one, as if each is convinced that she is still invested and in charge, and their strength as a group is infallible. Although she asks in verse "Apocalypse / We've all been there / The same old trips / Why should we care? ", all the Scoobies join her, including Giles despite his suspicions that Buffy is no longer interested in her life. Secrets reveal themselves steadily throughout the episode. Xander fears that his future marriage will turn him into an argumentative drunk like his father. He attempts to avoid his fears through the song "I'll Never Tell", singing "'coz there's nothing to tell", after summoning Sweet to Sunnydale to show him that he and Anya will be happy. Amid the various annoyances Xander and Anya express through this song, some verses are clear sighted observations of behavior, such as Anya's accusation that Xander—once in love with Buffy—uses Buffy as a mother figure to hide behind. Anya also avoids the truth by burying herself in wedding plans without thinking critically about what being married will entail; instead she considers Xander an accessory to her desired lifestyle. Of all the characters, Anya is the most preoccupied with the style of singing and songs, demanding to know if Spike sang "a breakaway pop hit, or a book number", and asking Dawn if the pterodactyl she facetiously says she gave birth to also broke into song. Anya and Xander's duet is the only song in the episode to address the audience directly. During the long single shot scene when she and Xander talk over each other insisting to Giles that evil must be at play, Anya refers to the audience, saying "It was like we were being watched  Like there was a wall missing in our apartment  Like there were only three walls and not a fourth wall." Albright asserts that Anya's constant preoccupation with her and others' performances indicates that she has serious doubts about her future supporting role as Xander's wife. Two Buffy essayists note that Willow and Giles sing together at the start of the episode, but later Tara and Giles share a duet to express the diminished part each plays in their respective relationships. Although "Once More, with Feeling" allows all the characters to confess truthfully, with the exception of Willow, it does not resolve the behavior that demanded confession in the first place. At the end of the episode, Buffy kisses Spike, initiating a romance that she hides from her friends. Their relationship lasts until the end of the series, marked for a time by Buffy's loathing of him because he has no soul. Her relationship with Spike, however, allows her to feel lust and attraction, which she yearns for after being pulled back from a heavenly dimension. In The Psychology of Joss Whedon, Mikhail Lubyansky writes that, although Buffy's first step toward re engaging with her life is telling the Scoobies the truth in the song "Something to Sing About", she does not find meaning again until the end of the season. In his essay "A Kantian Analysis of Moral Judgment in Buffy the Vampire Slayer", Scott Stroud explains that Buffy, as the central character throughout the series, is torn between her desires and her duty, in a Kantian illustration of free will vs. predeterminism, symbolized by her responsibility as a Slayer and her adolescent impulses. In earlier seasons, this takes the form of simpler pleasures such as dating and socializing, interspersed with defeating evil forces. It reaches a climax in the ultimate sacrifice when Buffy offers to die to save the world. However, "Once More, with Feeling", according to Stroud, is the turning point at which she begins to face her responsibility to the community, her friends and her family. Not only does she continue her Slaying despite a lack of inspiration, but for the rest of the season she works at a humiliating job to provide for her sister and friends.