The Broadway Theatre Review: Melissa Etheridge: My Window

By Ross

This is a big-time Broadway musical cabaret and concert, slammed all together in what she calls a “very long story about how I got here.” And she isn’t kidding. Strumming out guitar chord strings with an expert glee, Melissa Etheridge beckons us to My Window with an inviting force, finding humor and pathos along the way, layering her tale, which is a tad too long if you ask me, with her magnificent rock vocal rawness and roughness. Framed with a somewhat compelling (and sometimes not) storytelling style, both musically and emotionally, My Window draws us in like only a full-fledged rock goddess can, engaging us with her music and lyrics, but more so with her raspy singing voice that is as powerful as ever.

Making her Broadway debut, her magnificently performed (and written) music is mixed in with her life story, and the first act has everything you could hope for from the engagement. She’s clever and charming, humorous and genuine, in the way she unpacks her beginnings. The writing of her journey really does start at the beginning (to be honest, all I could hear in my head was that line from “The White Lotus” season 2, said to Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya by Tom Hollander’s Quentin as she starts her tale from the very beginning), and as written by Etheridge, with some assistance from her wife, Linda Wallem Etheridge (Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie“), it unravels in a straightforward traditional manner bordering somewhat on the simplistic and overtly obvious. It is tender, sweet, and touching, but it does lack a certain poetic underscoring, feeling like a reading of a Wikipedia listing rather than a deeper emotional unpacking and dissecting. Luckily her delivery somehow saves it from itself. Maybe it is in the way she sometimes stumbles through, making it feel like spoken truths, rather than written dialogue. Or maybe it’s just her innate entertaining charm, which, unfortunately, begins to run out of connecting gas as the module rides into the complicated Act Two.

Yet, there she is, standing upright and endearing from the beginning, as her (mostly) one-person show fills the space of the Circle in the Square Theater, playing with the less-than-optimal structuring of that usually extreme thrust stage (or in-the-round theater). The music though, regardless of the stage structure, rings out true and strong, as she takes in the audience and the space with an expert air. Her fan base has joyfully turned out in droves for this always-energetic performer, lapping up, like I did, her very personal engagement that seems somewhat inspired by Springsteen on Broadway back in 2017. Although I bet she was wishing for a more conventional proscenium like he had.

But as is, she gets to strut her stuff with confidence, up and down the aisle, rubbing elbows and sweet words with her adoring fans. In one of those moments in her telling, she explains her impulse for the show, talking about the experience of moving from club dates to arena concerts. “The bigger the audiences got, the further away you all were.” Which rings true, and as directed with a nod towards intimacy and honesty by Amy Tinkham (“The Acting Thing“; Aerosmith Peace Out Farewell Tour), My Window draws us close, enveloping us in her Act One progress beautifully, playing it out strong and hard on the numerous guitars brought forth by a very charming and funny crew gal, the “Roadie” Kate Owens (Hulu’s “The Other Black Girl”), who embodies, silently but very physically, a number of small, funny roles. She also delivers to the stage real-life mementos from Etheridge’s life with beautiful aplomb, including a tennis racket that was her first make-believe garage guitar, her true-to-life first childhood guitar, a macrame guitar strap woven for her by her loving father, her very first talent show trophy, minuscule beside her soon-to-be displayed Grammy, and of course, her shiny Oscar; a pinnacle, she tells us, that she received for “I Need to Wake Up“, a song from the documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

This is the kind of framing that we happily lean into, and Act One is overflowing with these kinds of compelling and emotionally clear banter, including some more difficult moments, like the homophobic response she received from her mother when she was still quite young trying to come to terms with her sexuality. Interspersing autobiographical antidotes through one beautifully rendered song after another, her memories are dutifully unpacked, “fresh off the pumpkin truck” with the kind of drama that makes for great stories and songs, as she tells us, both happy and sometimes devastatingly real.

She’s a born entertainer, telling it like it is, as she has from the age of 12 singing in bars and the occasional prison, driven by her encouraging and loving father. On a simple sparse stage, designed wisely by set designer Bruce Rodgers, with strong (although sometimes distracting) projections designed by Olivia Sebesky (The New Group’s Jerry Springer: The Opera), and rock star lighting by Abigail Rosen Holmes (David Byrne’s Contemporary Color), leather-heavy costuming by Andrea Lauer (Broadway’s American Idiot), and a stellar sound design by Shannon Slaton (Broadway’s The Illusionists), My Window ushers us out into the intermission feeling enlivened and compelling held, thoroughly loving the raspy vocals and superior musicality of this beloved performer, who sounds as magnificent as you remember. Maybe even better with age.

Melissa Etheridge: My Window is truly loaded with hits and personal favorites, delivered as gorgeously as one could hope for. She wows us on piano with a voice that soars, and kills it with her guitar playing, delivering one of the best versions of “On Broadway” that I have ever heard, winking at us as she howls out the lyrics that make us all smile. Her “Juliet,” “Meet Me In The Back,” “Bring Me Some Water,” “I Want To Come Over,” and the indelible “I’m The Only One,” solidify her goddess stature, not that it needed polishing. Her powerful place in Rock and Roll history can not be denied.

With the first act filled with projections of family photos and hometown front yards, My Window embraces us. I just wish I felt the same way about Act Two.

She fills us in with all of her laundry, both dirty and clean, unpacking, to different levels of clarity, her failed marriages and the tragedies that were unfortunately attached to parts of it. She talks about her real-life “Movie Star’s Wife” who remains unnamed (although she encourages us all to google it), and the famous people she hung around with at prime Hollywood locales. Also without naming names. Which, I might add, is refreshing. But it is in the way she edits her story, filling in some areas with details, and dismissing other arenas far too quickly and simply, that starts to put some distance in between the singer, the songwriter, the storyteller, and us, as if, like my friend noted, she had a few privacy clauses in a contract that she had to abide by.

She decidedly throws her sister under the bus, numerous times (which is funny, until it isn’t), and shoulder shrugs away simplistic statements about love and divorce. She discusses her fight with cancer in a way that feels honest, but, in the end, a bit dangerous, attacking Western medicine, which is a complication that I think should be avoided. I understand it is a complex issue, and although it pleases me to hear that she is 12 years cancer-free, I still would encourage all to talk intensely with their primary care doctor about all sorts of treatments available. And not simply disregard conventional treatment because of a few casually stated ideas.

But I do love her ability to render her stories without hesitating; to discuss sexuality in as open a way as she does, normalizing both some stereotypical behaviors with a grin, while also speaking true and emotionally clear about gay women and marriage. “She moved in,” Etheridge tells us with a smile. “That’s what we do.” And we embrace her for that. Along with the loving tribute to her sweet father who died of cancer. But a shift starts to occur in the way she tells her tale, and one that made me sit back a little in my seat, disengaging my heart from the soul on stage. As my companion said after the show, “We were just invited into a cult?“

Etheridge begins to unwrap her less traditional path toward her emotional and physical healing place, using cannabis, mescaline, and shamanism as a substitute for Western Medicine. Once again, this is a complicated personal issue, one that shouldn’t be handled so cavalierly. And even as it is accompanied by a magnificent psychedelic light show that is both epic and beautiful, the ingredients and substances around it start to cause me to back off. Followed directly by one of the most simplistic explanations of the ending of a marital relationship that I have ever heard:

“When I returned and tried to explain that everything is love,” she says after her trip into the healing powers of Ayahuasca, “I realized that this was something you cannot teach. It can only be learned.” And her second marriage was finished. Over. In one sentence. With only a few further digs into that bitter earth left to be said around the tragic death of their son. The first email she tells us that she received from her ex simply states, “He’s dead.” The second, “I blame you.” It’s abundantly clear how we are supposed to take that in. I’m just not sure we needed to be ushered to that space without further understanding or contemplation.

The heartbreak is all there, though, in black and white: Etheridge’s first-born son died of a fentanyl overdose at the age of 21 in 2020, and the show leads you through it with Etheridge standing erect, barely lit in a sea of black. The framework is powerful and intense, yet a tad uncomfortable, as if we are being led down a dark alley and told not to look around or too deeply into the darkness that envelopes us. To ignore all the complications that exist in that harsh tragedy, and just let her lead us out with some bumper sticker sayings. In a way, it doesn’t begin to unpack the landscape of grief and remorse, not that any show really needs to. But by bringing in some of the harsher aspects of life, love, parenting, and marriage to make us see some in one way, and ignore others, just didn’t feel fair or balanced. And a tad manipulatively simple.

“My son had been swallowed up by this addiction. I kept feeling all this guilt & shame. Had I done enough? As I went deep into this darkness/ despair I just kept feeling one thing – ‘My son would want me to be happy.’ I was reaching for my happiness, reaching for anything that would lift me up. The one thing that lifted me up was knowing my son would want me to be happy. All is Love.”

Perhaps, in a way, this is not how real life actually played out. I hope not, as this tragedy is ‘Capital “T” Trauma’ and the despair and grief that surround it all is a complication worthy of some therapy – a pathway that is never mentioned within this construction. Although I am biased, being a psychotherapist myself. Hopefully, some sort of therapy was a part of her processing, and was given more devoted time than the hallucinogenic trips she invested in with a visiting Shaman. But who am I to say. In a way, her recovery is her business, and not mine to understand.

But as delivered here in this complicated second act, the complexity of trauma and grief is given the short end of the stick. It takes a skilled hand to write about this kind of unimaginable emotional space where life has taken her. And it isn’t unpacked here in a way that feels authentic or honest in its intense complexity. On this dramatic stage on Broadway, this becomes the show’s biggest problem and one that hangs on me like a cat scratch. 

Melissa Etheridge: My Window is a powerful and engaging performance by a woman and artist whose musical talent is deep, raw, and delicious to behold. Her candor is embraced by all, even when it feels a bit rushed toward the end to find that simple statement to make it all edible. All is love, is the refrain, and even inside that simplification, she excels in her musical performance and her engagement. It is in the finer more complicated aspects of grief and tragedy where she hasn’t really found her way to turning personal undeniable pain and heartbreak into theatrical storytelling art that doesn’t feel like a soapbox manipulation. I sort of wished I left at intermission. Although I would have missed her magnificent encore. And that would have been a damn shame.