What the...?

I guess you could regard this as a twist on fan fiction: Fan Adaptation For Stage.

Having been involved in musical theater myself, after watching Once More, With Feeling and being amazed by its quality, I couldn't help but imagine it on stage. All good musicals deserve to be performed live, and to play Buffy, Spike, Willow et al live on stage would be many a young performer's dream.

For a long time I just left it as an idea in my head, thinking it pointless if no one was actually going to perform it, but then I though, what the hellmouth -- if I just put it out there, it's no more pointless than any other fan fiction (is that a good or a bad thing?)

Who the...?

Who is it that dares to touch this classic, even in an unofficial fan fictiony sort of way? Well, I'm no Joss Whedon, but to give myself a grain of credibility in the musical field; as well as being a frustrated song writer myself, I've played in many bands, as a singer, drummer and bass player, and have a Certificate in Audio Engineering.

Regarding musical theater, I've performed in amateur productions of such musicals as Les Miserables, Grease, A Little Night Music and Godspell, and done the sound mix for Little Shop of Horrors and Evita (one performance of which had Russell Crowe in the audience, but that's another story.)

As a writer I've spent 3 years writing and drawing a comic series for my Uni newspaper, as well as writing sketches and scripts for radio and stage.

How the...?

There's actually not too much of "Once More, With Feeling" itself that needs to be altered to put it on stage. Much of my adaptation of the episode could probably come under the headings of "direction", "design" or "choreography", but one thing I think essentially to making it a stand-alone show is to incorporate some of the backstory from the earlier episodes of Season 6, and that's where chopping and changing and rewriting really comes in to play -- like the Prologue -- and is most fun.

More details on the nitty gritty are found in the Notes section.