'Melissa Etheridge: My Window' is heartfelt

‘MELISSA ETHERIDGE: MY WINDOW’: Melissa Etheridge. Photo: Jenny Anderson.

MELISSA ETHERIDGE: MY WINDOW
Written by Melissa Etheridge with Linda Wallem Etheridge
Directed by Amy Tinkham
Through November 19, 2023
Circle in the Square Theatre
https://melissaetheridge.com/

By Scott Harrah

One doesn’t have to be a fan of rock icon Melissa Etheridge to appreciate her many musical talents and contributions to American pop culture since her 1988 debut album. Even those unfamiliar with the artist or her work will revere her for the music and her story of overcoming adversity after watching her one-woman Broadway concert confessional, Melissa Etheridge: My Window. Although she was hardly the first female rocker—she arrived on the American scene years after such icons as Pat Benatar, Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac, Debbie Harry of Blondie, Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders and Tina Turner held their own in a sea of testosterone—Ms. Etheridge still shattered musical glass ceilings in the 1980s and 1990s for women, especially lesbian women. She was one of many women who came of age and made it big when the rock scene was mostly male-dominated. Ms. Etheridge commands our respect from the moment she steps on stage. She is not afraid to tell us her age and her birthday in 1961, the same birthday she shares with her older sister.

Ms. Etheridge opens the first act talking about growing up in Leavenworth, Kansas—home of the famous United States Penitentiary and also the U.S. Army’s Fort Leavenworth with its adjacent military prison—with a supportive father who was a schoolteacher, and a distant, emotionally aloof mother who worked as a computer programmer. Young “Missy” (as she was called by her family) falls in love with pop music when she hears the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” on the radio at age three. She later learns to play guitar and is encouraged by her father to pursue her dream of becoming a professional musician. By the time she’s in high school, she has played music for the inmates at the Leavenworth prison and is soon playing with bands in local bars, and her loving father is behind her every step of the way—he accompanies her at gigs because she’s not legally old enough to be performing in places that serve alcohol. However, her mother is not exactly thrilled about young Melissa spending weekends playing music in bars. All of Act One is consistently compelling, with Ms. Etheridge vividly recounting her middle-class Midwestern childhood and teenage years with searing honesty and emotion. Now in her early 60s, Ms. Etheridge hasn’t lost any of her charming, bad-girl spunk and she is still in fine, raspy voice.

She recalls being sent off to Boston to attend the Berklee College of Music. She was not really interested in studying and started meeting “out” lesbians for the first time ever, starting first with her college dorm roommate from New York City. She played music and sang at local bars in Boston, including lesbian bars. She dropped out of Berklee after three semesters and moved back home to Kansas briefly, but after her mother discovered she was gay, Melissa was told she was “not welcome” at the family home in a rather cruel and dismissive note. Melissa recalls telling her father that she is gay and he’s more accepting because her dad is much more open-minded. She then heads to Los Angeles to pursue her music career. Life in California is a struggle, but she manages to land a job playing music a few nights a week at a lesbian bar in Long Beach. It is at this bar that Melissa is eventually “discovered” and immediately offered a record contract by Chris Blackwell of Island Records. She recorded her first album with Island Records, the eponymous Melissa Etheridge in 1988, with the hit single “Bring Me Some Water.” The song and album received major radio airplay and earned her a Grammy Award nomination. While she was on the way “up” to mainstream success, she was not “out” as a lesbian professionally yet.

The retelling of Ms. Etheridge’s early years and her road to success in Act One holds the audience’s interest throughout, and she sings early hits and covers songs she admires such as “On Broadway,” and as the show breaks for intermission, we are left in high anticipation for Act Two because the first half of the show is engaging enough to leave us wanting more, as we know that most of her big hits will be in the latter part of My Window.

Act Two starts out promising, with Ms. Etheridge performing some of her signature songs like “I Want to Come Over’ and “I’m the Only One” from her mega-smash hit 1993 album Yes, I Am. Of course, her most famous hit, “Come to My Window,” is included, but later in the show. Ms. Etheridge talks about the highs and lows of her career after “making it,” from her many lovers to grappling with her father’s death from cancer in the early 1990s to her own battle with breast cancer in 2004.

She discusses officially coming out at the first LGBTQ+ inaugural ball for President Bill Clinton to winning a Grammy Award and eventually an Oscar for the song “I Need to Wake Up” that she wrote and performed for Al Gore’s climate change film An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. It is somewhat disappointing that Ms. Etheridge (who co-wrote the show’s book with her wife, Linda Wallem Etheridge) chose to pad up the second act with filler like a cover of Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” (which she performed at the 2005 Grammy Awards). She also goes a bit overboard with a story about “tripping” after eating cannabis brownies and having an out-of-body experience and then sings a lesser-known song, complete with psychedelic projections on the stage. In moments like this—when she dwells on some hippie-dippy psychobabble about intergalactic cats that even confused her girlfriend at the time (don’t ask!)—she loses the audience. Perhaps director Amy Tinkham should have trimmed out the show’s more self-indulgent moments because at two and a half hours with an intermission, My Window is a bit long and might work better as a streamlined, fine-tuned 90-minute one act.

However, Ms. Etheridge makes up for the distractions in other parts of the show, especially when she goes out into the audience to sing directly to her fans. In addition, her personal stories about losing her first-born son at age 21 to a fentanyl overdose in 2021 during the pandemic, anecdotes about her many failed relationships, and her regrets about not spending more time with her children—are all heartfelt and painful, and show she’s brave enough to share some of her life’s darkest moments.

Melissa Etheridge: My Window is an ambitious and insightful look at Melissa Etheridge that, like the artist herself, isn’t perfect but still has a lot of heart and soul.

Edited by Scott Harrah
Published October 8, 2023
Reviewed at October 6, 2023 press performance.