Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Midnight sing-along showings of the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are emerging across the US. The episode, “Once More with Feeling,” is a musical in the light opera tradition: little of the dialogue is spoken, and musical numbers drive the narrative. Though the episode ran in the show’s second-to-last season, fans insist that it is pivotal in the Buffy universe.

One Friday in January, more than 800 people packed the grand Music Box Theatre near Chicago’s Wrigley Field, electric with anticipation of the show. The evening began with a line around the block; once inside the rococo-molto-kitsch theatre lobby, organizers were on hand to pass out small bags of props to attendees: plastic fangs, a tiny kazoo, a New Year’s popper, monster finger puppets.

After “karaoke” replays of two scenes from other episodes of Buffy, complete with audience participation, the MC insisted that Buffy is about female empowerment and that any heckling from the audience must reflect that. Neither the early arch creativity of The Rocky Horror Picture Show nor its oppressive degenerations of recent years would be welcome, it seemed.

As originally broadcast, “Once More with Feeling” ran 70 minutes with commercials; as played for sing-along audiences, it includes karaoke subtitles. For the Buffy newbie, the experience suggests something like attending a ceremony of a somewhat obscure religion-the Yazidis of northern Iraq, say, or India’s Jains. The full import of the arcana of internal references and points of enthusiasm or dismay may escape the Buffy uninitiated.

Although bits of similarity to The Rocky Horror Picture Show occasional arose, sing-along Buffy bore more resemblance to The Sound of Music sing-along: both are fiercely regimented, and neither has a campy enough script to allow room for as much cheeky or bawdy or ill-tempered mouthing off or acting out. The Music Box Buffy audience was encouraged to shout, “Shut up, Dawn!” only when the MC waved a cue card reading, “Shut up, Dawn,” the MC ran a practiced and well-executed wave during Buffy’s climactic number, and the props were carefully managed: use the popper at the end of Tara’s “pornographic” number, use the kazoo during the half-step chord change that only some of the cast could manage during one song, and the audience was invited to hold mobile phones open and aloft during Giles’ power ballad in a 21st-century nod to lighters at classic rock shows.

A theatre full of people able to sing enthusiastically along with an episode of a television show leads the observer to suppose that Americans have too few opportunities to sing together. As far back as 25 years ago, the sense that singing together at summer camp was fun was giving way to the notion that singing together was for losers. Unless we avail ourselves of fairly obscure opportunities, the only chance those leading secular lives have to sing together is at the ball park, butchering the famously unsingable “Star Spangled Banner,” attempting the usually ragged “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” or, for fans in Boston, bellowing along with “Sweet Caroline.” Or we can box in a performer like Norah Jones, insisting that she match her live performance exactly to the recorded set so we can sing along with her and the rest of the audience just like we do at home with her blasting on the stereo. Perhaps the explosion of music and genres has actually depleted the pool of songs we have in common that we can sing together in situations other than in a stadium full of Barbra Streisand or Coldplay fans. That moment of like-mindedness creates a narrow community, but maybe it’s the broader sense of community that used to be associated with traditional songs and folk music that we need these days.