Melissa Etheridge: My Window Broadway Reviews

Share it she does, superbly, in “Melissa Etheridge: My Window,” which opened Thursday at Circle in the Square Theater, just one block east of where an earlier version of the show ran Off Broadway last fall. On Broadway, this rock concert spliced with memoir has gained a striking intimacy, as if Etheridge had shrunk an arena to fit in the palm of her hand.

Etheridge says she knows her son would want her to live, and embrace life, and this is what she has tried to do. She ends the show with “Come to My Window,” encouraging her fans to sing along. They do. It’s a crowd-pleasing end to a show that resoundingly succeeds as a concert, rather than a piece of theater. As Etheridge sings in “Here I Am Again,” music is her lifeblood—both energy and salve. “The song,” she sings, “will never end.”

The production is a lot more charming when it sidesteps ego and Etheridge just lets loose. Sprinkled in among her own songs, she includes “On Broadway” by Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil and Leiber and Stoller, and Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart.” I liked it especially when she came off the stage and wandered the audience, singing to enraptured theatergoers.

Perhaps there’s not a false word in that realization, but, reached, on stage at least, so soon on this lickety-split path of grief, there’s not much complexity or depth there either. Her recovery from unimaginable grief seems blessedly brief, and in real life we wish her for nothing less. That it doesn’t ring true on a dramatic stage is a problem, though. Melissa Etheridge: My Window is a performance built as much on candor as it is on musical talent, and until the big, rushed moment towards the end, Etheridge succeeds on both counts. One suspects its just too soon to deal with the latest tragedy, and Etheridge, her co-writer and her director just haven’t yet found a way to turn this ultimate heartache into art.

I don’t feel I have a right to judge anybody’s life, even somebody who is depicting it for me on stage. This is doubly so because I doubt the full measure of Melissa Etheridge is revealed in the monologues in-between the music of “Melissa Etheridge: My Window.” In any case, it is the music that most matters, and, at 62, Melisssa Etheridge still rocks.

From her best-known hits to the first song she ever wrote as a kid, each one soars, their poetic lyrics supplying the emotional depth the script sometimes misses. As a casual Etheridge fan, I left wanting to listen to each song over again and discover the rest, though the exhilarating experience of hearing her pour her desperation into 'I'm the Only One,' her fiery desire into 'I Wanna Come Over,' and the full extent of her nimble guitar mastery into 'Bring Me Some Water' live is something the recordings can't replicate. Those can only provide a window into the experience.

And while the show’s title has many meanings, it does derive, in part, from Etheridge’s mega-hit “Come to My Window,” which closes the show on a literal high note. And unlike cabaret, there is no encore! When the song is over, the “window” is closed. Fortunately, we’ve been able to take a long, sometimes hard, and often revealing look at the life of an extraordinary woman!

Do we get a profound overarching narrative akin to Bruce Springsteen’s existential Broadway howl? No, but not really the aim here. This charming show, playing for just nine weeks, is both a valediction and an introduction, perhaps for a younger audience, to a folk-rock artist who kept everyone’s faith, including her own.

Despite the occasional tangent on, say, plant-based medicine (cannabis versus chemo), My Window is a straightforward artist’s journey of self-expression and survival, lovingly ladled to a fan-filled crowd in itself worth watching. Two women behind me gossiped unabashedly through most of the second act but clammed up every time Etheridge launched into one of her chart-toppers: “Bring Me Some Water,” “I’m the Only One” and the title heartbreaker. Let’s be real: that voice is why we’re here, raspy compound of whiskey, gravel and gasoline. Like its owner, it has mellowed, lessened in force and range, but still calls to our window from the darkness, an alley cat wail of raw desire and the will to never back down.

If he’s lucky, someone will do him a favor and take him to Circle in the Square to see Melissa Etheridge’s My Window. Then he can hear the smoky-voiced—and extremely articulate—singer-guitarist rip through songs such as the seductive “Like the Way I Do”; the R&B-soaked “Bring Me Some Water,” her first single; and the Grammy-winning anthem that gives the show its title, “Come to My Window.” Loneliness, longing, heartbreak, passion—if she’s not a philosopher of rock, then who is?

Her songs are revealed to be the equivalent of her talking. She may not be scrupulous about rhyme, which crops up when convenient, but she never ceases to write from who she is. Every thought is true to that. Audience members, most particularly those not foremost among her devotees, are likely to leave with an enhanced respect for her – and gratitude for her lyrics – for instance, a lyric as trenchant and indisputable as this: “There’s no truth in shame.” She got that right.