Theatre in Review: Melissa Etheridge: My Window (Circle in the Square)

	Melissa Etheridge in My Window. Photo: Jenny Anderson

"Sometimes I think I'm so dramatic," Melissa Etheridge muses at the top of her almost-one-woman show. Actually, "affable" is more like it: Armed with a dry wit and a knack for self-deprecation, she guides us, genially, through the highlights (and a few lows) of her tumultuous life. A skilled raconteuse, she is never at a loss for a colorful anecdote or a wry observation while narrating her journey from the heartland to the top of the rock charts, a personal odyssey that included lots of hell-raising, life in the celebrity fishbowl, and a terrible tragedy that, it seems, she is still struggling to process.

My Window recalls her youth in Leavenworth, Kansas, where, at an early age, she was seduced by music. (The day she got her own guitar may have been the peak of her childhood.) Quickly gaining expertise as a performer and songwriter, she started playing bars and "a whole lot of prisons" at a startlingly early age. (Because she was too young for a license, her father had to drive her to gigs.) In high school, she got an unforgettable lesson in desire from the daughter of a colonel at the local military base and, from then on, never looked back, even when her mother tried to throw her out for having girlfriends.

Next came Boston and an abortive career as a student at Berklee College of Music, followed by her first lesbian bar. ("It was very informative," she says, with typical wry understatement). After a brief stay back home, she was off to LA, where she built a live career, eventually landing a contract with Island Records. Following a parade of lovers, she landed a long-term relationship with the (soon-to-be) ex-wife of a well-known actor. ("Look it up," she says with a sly smile. Well, it is in Wikipedia.) Then, attending a gay and lesbian event on the evening of Bill Clinton's first inauguration, she blurted the truth into an open mic, outing herself to the world. (She underlined the point by titling her next album, Yes, I Am.) Interestingly, she notes, while her previous records each sold in hundreds of thousands, Yes I Am went platinum six times over.

Etheridge's generally humorous memoirs are, of course, punctuated by songs delivered in that indelible voice, a rasp with the consistency of Brillo pads yet filled with powerful longing and plenty of attitude. (Shannon Slaton's crisp, clear sound design is an enormous asset; the show is more intelligible than some Broadway musicals.) You can expect gold-plated hits like "I'm the Only One," "I Want to Come Over," and "My Window." But hang on for the newish "Juliet" (with a haunting refrain that asks, "Tell me, Juliet, where's your Romeo?") and sizzling covers of "On Broadway" and "Piece of My Heart." Other highlights include the rocking, rhythmic "Meet Me in the Back," here sung as a tribute to her years of carousing, and the stunning "Nowhere to Go," about dead-end lives in the heartland. ("There's no one to hear/You might as well scream/They never woke up/From the American dream"). Having only known her from her extensive airplay in the '90s, it's a thrill to experience her masterful performance style in person.

For the first act and a half of My Window, Etheridge's light touch stands her in good stead. The obviously difficult relationships with her mother and sister (the latter characterized as a law-breaking hellion) are given scant attention and names are not applied to her celebrity friends and lovers. When she wades into deeper waters, however, a certain awkwardness intrudes. Her firm belief in the spiritual properties of plant-based psychedelics, including cannabis, mescaline, and ayahuasca, is repeatedly invoked; it's a debatable point made too insistently. Rather more questionable is her assertion that cancer is caused mainly by stress, an idea she evokes to justify her decision to terminate chemotherapy after only a few treatments. (To be sure, she has been cancer-free for 19 years, but one shudders to think about others following her lead.) She treats her son's death from opioid addiction -- a tragedy followed by a shockingly ugly repudiation from her former partner, the young man's biological mother -- with pained rationalizations that are more than the show can bear. I cannot imagine the sorrow she must be enduring but she may not be ready to fully share it with her public.

Still, the star certainly stands by her fans, providing an entertaining evening that may also win her new followers among Broadway audiences. As co-written by her current wife, Linda Wallem Etheridge, and directed by Amy Tinkham, My Window is an intimate evening of music and storytelling. (Along for the ride is Kate Owens as "The Roadie," a silent onstage assistant who, toting guitars and various props, earns many a laugh with her physical comedy bits.) A design team drawn partly from the concert-touring world provides the right environment. Bruce Rodgers' restrained set provides an effective canvas for Abigail Rosen Holmes' colorful, highly directional lighting and Olivia Sebesky's projections, which draw heavily on photos and footage from Etheridge's past as well as trippy animations illustrating some of her higher times. Andrea Lauer dresses the star appropriately.

And, as Broadway shows go, it's better to spend time with a star still at the top of her game instead of sitting through another cliché-ridden bio-musical that struggles to isolate its subject's mystique. A longtime fan of musical theatre, Etheridge is clearly delighted to be on Broadway and audiences are likely to respond in kind. --David Barbour