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Behind the scenes of ''Buffy'''s musical episode | buffy_l
THEY'RE SLAYING OUR SONG Gellar gets touched up before her smokin' finale, ''Where Do We Go From Here''
Sarah Michelle Geller Photographed by Seth Joel
By Mary Kaye Schilling
Mary Kaye Schilling
Mary Kaye Schilling is an assistant managing editor at EW

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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