Singing as Narrative Power in "Once More with Feeling"

The cool thing about "Once More with Feeling" is not that it's a musical -- the cool part is actually how the characters use their voices and their unexpected desire to break out into song to their advantage. In any musical setting of a text, whether it's through Broadway-esque song and dance or through grand opera, is going to sound a little contrived simply because the act of singing is very often attached to theatricality. So we can ask ourselves: is our discomfort watching this episode due to some sort of fear that the characters are actually addressing the problems in their lives with excessive emotionality/poetry? Are their words trite or hackneyed because of the musical idiom?

I would argue that the more important feature of the musical episode is its ability to give characters a heightened narrative voice -- it's not so much what they're saying in the songs as how they're saying it. The characters are more swift and uninhibited; moreover, singing gives them an outlet by which to "own" their relationship to and their prominence in the episode (for example, when Anya says to Xander, "this is my verse!"). It's not just that the characters are more self-aware because they're singing, and it's not just that they have varying degrees of awareness of what other people are singing about -- more than that, song gives them a way to position themselves narratively within the episode in a more subtle, colorful way. I think that pretty interesting! It also lets them infuse meaning -- the jazzy demon who holds Dawn hostage uses song to add dissonance to the word "hell" and cheerful airiness to the word "heaven."