Maeve Bauer, Spectrum Editor
Buffy, Spike, Willow and the other residents of Sunnyvale will gather on stage at Richard Newdick Theatre in Shafer Street Playhouse from April 17-19. Doomsday VCU, a theater company on campus will be putting on “Once More, With Feeling,” a production of the musical episode of “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.”
The musical is taken from the season six episode of the same name, when the demon Sweet puts the town of Sunnyvale under a musical curse.
“Buffy, the Vampire Slayer,” is a beacon of late 1990s and early 2000s fashion. When creating the costumes for the show Ian Lambert, first-year cinema major and the show’s costume designer, pulled inspiration from the original episode, as well as the series as a whole.
“A lot of like that 90s, early 2000s fashion has been super popular recently. Which is very helpful in terms of finding those types of pieces out in the wild, like thrift stores,” Lambert said. “That’s been very helpful, that our fashion interest lines up with everybody else right now.”
Buffy has been one of Lambert’s favorite characters to style — having fun with the vampire slayer’s bolder outfits and red leather pants in which she is known for. They also enjoy styling Spike, the moody-vampire-turned-love-interest.
Doomsday’s mission is to create more musical opportunities for students. Despite the small budget they have to work with, the cast, crew and board of Doomsday does everything they can to put on a spectacular show.
This early 2000s musical dreamscape will be brought to life by Max Montalvo, a third-year theatre student. He has been imagining putting on the show since last year. Montalvo said his cast and crew has described it as “ambitious, but going extremely well.”
Montalvo grew up watching “Buffy” with his mom. He saw Coalition Theater do a stage reading of the episode and brought it to Doomsday to bring his vision to life. Montalvo felt like this story was important to share with college students. The original episode takes place as the characters are transitioning from college to full-blown adulthood.
“I have always appreciated the truthfulness to ‘teenagrisms’ there is and watching high schoolers grow up all the way into adults,” Montalvo said. “So most of these people [the characters] are adults by now, or they’re in college transitioning to adults, which is what a lot of my cast is. It’s kind of helping put a realness to what their feeling and what they’re able to bring to the stage.”
Doomsday has done a plethora of out-of-the-ordinary productions. Within the last year they have put on “The Nightman Cometh,” the unofficial “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia,” musical, in which Montalvo acted as stage manager.
“I think that there’s thousands of things that we all want to do and both Doomsday and all the other student orgs are helping make a lot of things happen throughout the semesters,” Montalvo said.
This year they have also done “Tick, Tick … Boom!” and “36 Questions,” the first full stage adaptation of the musical podcast of the same name. Caleb Hamiltion, the President of Doomsday, said that the board of directors tries to bring the director’s visions to life.
Hamilton delved into the work that goes into putting on these shows, and the wild goose chase he went through to make “Once More, With Feeling,” possible.
“I was calling and emailing with people from New York, Detroit, Irvine. I was going all over the country to talk to people through emails and phone calls,” Hamilton said. “I will never forget this one. It was a trio of women, they were in Detroit have a queer theater where they put this on. I emailed them and I went ‘how’d you do this?’ and they went ‘you don’t want to talk to us — you want to email this person,’ and I was given the email info@buffymusical.com.”
“Once More, With Feeling,” will be playing throughout the weekend at Shafer St. Playhouse. It will be showing at 7:30 p.m. Friday night and 2 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.