Melissa Etheridge, genially self-deprecating in leather pants, kicks off her solo show My Window by announcing that she’s going to “tell you a story about how the hell I got here,” leaning into the aesthetic frisson of a folk-infused rock star taking over a Broadway house. Instead of glamming it up for the Great White Way, Etheridge pokes light fun at the grandeur of it all. In between the angsty blare of “Like the Way I Do,” which opens the show, Etheridge quips that her own lyrics are “so dramatic,” then with an impish wink adds that she knows her fans like the dramatic.
Over the course of My Window, as Etheridge travels through own biography, she alternates the approachable and the glamorous, switching between the modes of an extremely lucky and talented star and the kind of chatty aunt who might slip you a weed gummy and tell you mildly salacious stories at a family Thanksgiving. As you might expect from her lyrics, Etheridge spins a tale well and is great with specific detail — she describes the rust-tinted green eyes of a girl she had a crush on in high school — though as her series of loosely strung anecdotes progresses, it becomes harder for her to make them all cohere. Etheridge’s dependency on aw-shucks relatability as a performance mode can get grating, too, once she’s well into talking about throwing lavish parties near Chateau Marmont as if this is all so familiar, but there, as elsewhere in the show, her performer’s charisma tends to right things. Whenever she goes all out and really lays into a song, everything tends to click together.
Etheridge’s first act is the most compelling, given that she’s got a clear rise-to-fame arc to work with: Born in Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1961, she discovered music early on, started performing regularly by high school, briefly tried out college at Berklee before dropping out, making her way back to Kansas, and heading to Los Angeles, where she played lesbian bars before being discovered. Etheridge, who did this show Off Broadway last fall, works off a script co-written with her wife, Linda Wallem Etheridge, that seasons some of the expected beats of what can feel like the book of a yet-to-be-made bio-musical with more revealing observations. She’s particularly good at describing her loneliness as a young queer woman coming into herself amid the conformity of the Midwest — a moving sequence is set to the prairie sweep of “Nowhere to Go” — though she can also be roguishly funny. She’s got a partner onstage in Kate Owens, who plays a silent butch roadie, always on hand to give Etheridge a prop or stand in for a music teacher, bar owner, or one-night stand. Amy Tinkham, directing, keeps the spirit of the show relatively light, pulling the audience out of a grim moment with a quick scene change or sight gag. Owens dramatically presents Etheridge’s tiny Honorable Mention trophy from a local talent show on a pedestal early on in the show. Later, it’ll be joined by a Grammy and an Oscar.
Those awards pile up in the second act, where Etheridge’s career gets big, but her stories tend to lose their momentum. Describing the experience of shifting into playing arena shows, she mentions that the more people you tend to play for the farther away they get from you onstage. That’s well observed but difficult to get around dramatically — there’s little that hasn’t already been said about the loneliness of fame. Etheridge describes love affairs that sputter, her ultimately not-too-big-a-deal coming out during the Clinton inauguration, her experience with cancer, and the impact of her explorations with psychoactive substances. There, Etheridge tends to spend a great deal of time on her soapbox, which pulls the story away from the personal toward her feelings about drug policy and alternative medicine. That’s all fine and good, but just like dreams, drug trips aren’t easy to make profound onstage, and it’s hard to weave the trippy tone of those sequences into the rest of the piece. It also leads to an abrupt tonal shift, near the end of My Window, where Etheridge discusses the recent death of her son. There, she’s unsupported by the yarn-spinning affability that preceded this moment, suddenly bandaging a raw wound in public.
Etheridge brings the audience from that pain back to a triumphant finale, but you can feel the emotional strain it takes to leverage them there. Good thing she knows how to work a room. Etheridge’s an all-out performer, and just as she says onstage, really does seem to enjoy getting close to her audience. She wanders through the middle aisle of chairs at Circle in the Square during a number of songs, and at one point in my performance lovingly fondled one patron’s purse, then sat herself between another’s thighs while wailing on her guitar. Listening to her regale her audience with so many stories from her life, with her fun tales of bedding girls in Boston and winking blind items about queer Hollywood in the ’80s and ’90s, I realized that what I wanted more of was her experience writing music. Etheridge doesn’t spend much time talking about her process; in her telling, the songs just flow out of her after a bit of life experience. Maybe that’s just how she operates; maybe for all the other parts of her life she’s offering, she’d prefer to keep that process safe. Or in the case of her music, she’d just prefer to lead by example — to rock out, not tell.
Melissa Etheridge: My Window is at Circle in the Square.
