A funny thing happened on the way to this week's episode of ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'' Although TV's cult hit has always been a genre-busting anomaly -- combining elements of horror, gothic romance, soap opera, satire, and slapstick -- you could be fairly certain the characters wouldn't break into song.
But now Buffy's going Broadway, and it's all Stephen Sondheim's doing, really. The legendary lyricist-composer (''West Side Story,'' ''A Little Night Music'') is a god to ''Buffy'' creator Joss Whedon. ''I know the words to every one of his songs,'' admits the self-described musical geek. ''Well, except 'Passion,' which I've excised from my brain. It was just wrong.''
Whedon has been dreaming of staging an all-singing, all-dancing ''Buffy'' since the show's 1997 pilot. ''Every season I would ask, Are we going to do the musical episode?'' says Anthony Stewart Head (Buffy's Watcher, Giles), who displayed tasty vocal chops in a 2000 sequence. ''Joss would say he wasn't ready. It had to be organic.'' Whedon's hesitation was twofold: He wanted the episode to be ''a normal hour of 'Buffy''' that forwarded existing plot points, not an out-of-sequence stand-alone. Plus, he needed to find the time to write the words and music himself -- a virtually impossible task until this season, when he handed off day-to-day show-running to exec producer Marti Noxon.
As it was, the musical homage (airing Nov. 6) took a grueling six months to make: three months banging out the score on a piano Whedon learned to play just a few years ago (despite possessing only a tenuous grip on music composition, he had no collaborators) and three months of voice and dance lessons for the actors, not to mention all the lip-synching, choreographing, shooting, and editing. ''It was a nightmare,'' says an exhausted Whedon. ''The happiest nightmare I ever had.''
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