Melissa Etheridge Opens Up About Her Broadway Show: “I Have All the Power When I’m Speaking the Truth”

Originally published on Shondaland.com
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Melissa Etheridge is used to people screaming when she walks onstage. The Grammy- and Academy Award-winning singer-songwriter has performed at arenas, concert halls, and awards shows and is greeted nightly with ecstatic shrieks from fans at the Circle in the Square Theatre in New York. But one night, the reaction was different — when she walked onstage during an early preview of her one-woman show, My Window, a man in the audience yelled in joyful surprise.

“He just screamed,” Etheridge recalls during a recent phone interview with Shondaland. “He thought it was a jukebox musical. He didn’t know it was going to be me.”

It is Etheridge onstage, and she’s ready to tell her story. Part rock concert and part memoir, My Window, which originally debuted off-Broadway at New World Stages, chronicles Etheridge’s life as an artist and activist. Laid-back and conversational, she shares stories of her first time playing the guitar, her first kiss, and her experiences with psychedelic drugs. She describes surviving cancer and losing her son to opioids, and she sings more than 15 songs, played on at least eight different guitars.

Bringing a show to Broadway had long been a goal of Etheridge, who recalls loving musicals as a child and names Godspell and Funny Girl as two of her favorites. Composing songs for an original musical could be in her future, the singer adds.

But for now, she’s focused on My Window, which has been trimmed to two and a half hours from its first draft of approximately six hours. It was partly motivated by the success of Bruce Springsteen’s record-breaking one-man show, which opened on Broadway in 2017 and was revived in 2021. After seeing Springsteen’s performance, Etheridge was inspired to bring her own story to the stage and wrote the autobiographical show with her wife, Linda Wallem Etheridge. Her new memoir, Talking to My Angels, also tells her story in her own words.

“I’ve always been open, starting with coming out in ’93,” she says. “I really felt that being open was so much easier, especially back in the ’90s when paparazzi was a nightmare. Just to be open — to answer everything myself, to keep everything sort of clear and clean. I have all the power when I’m speaking the truths.”

Etheridge shares and shows her first forays into music, naming “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as the first song she heard and the Archies as her favorite childhood band. She was told, “Girls don’t play drums,” in her school music program, but she learned the guitar and performed in bars as a teenager. The audience is even treated to a rendition of the first song she wrote.

These stories are told with a wry sense of humor and a warm affection and gratitude. “I do realize that my desire and my dream that started when I was in the sixth, seventh, eighth grade was one that really motivated me,” she says. “A lot of people don’t have that in their mind until later in life. I think I was very fortunate to kind of have that drive and that ambition. The joy is not really the getting of the thing. It’s the journey to it, and, boy, you know, that enabled me to have quite a journey.”

It’s far from all work and no play; Etheridge also shares her memories of acknowledging her sexuality and the relationships that inspired confessional, romantically charged hits like “I Want to Come Over” and “I’m the Only One.” There are also joyful tales of performing in lesbian bars in Boston after withdrawing from the Berklee College of Music.

There are some somber moments when she recalls her parents’ reactions to her sexuality. Her father accepted her, but her mother didn’t. Etheridge has always been open about her sexuality, and in 1993, she shared on TV that she was gay. The announcement made headlines, establishing the singer as a public face in the queer community.

She became a face for cancer patients as well when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004 and began chemotherapy, enduring its painful side effects. When invited to perform at the 2005 Grammy Awards, she played and sang Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” without a wig. Etheridge’s electric performance, which she gave bald, resonated with cancer patients worldwide, and the following day, people receiving chemotherapy were seen out in public without wigs.

Etheridge knows her story is important to people. She’s been called a queer rock icon and credited with paving the way for lesbian musicians, but she has never felt pressure to serve as a role model.

“I think that that sort of pressure you put on yourself, I don’t want to take that on. I’m very clear with the boundaries I have around my family and stuff,” she says. “I’m pretty strong in how I walk every day and what I present. … I can see how deeply people are moved, and it’s a real honor and privilege and pleasure to entertain and lift people up this way.”

Raspy voiced and relaxed, Etheridge comes across as very accepting of life’s circumstances. She credits her current approach to life, and especially to her music, to having survived breast cancer. An essential factor, she says, is self-compassion.

“I think I had a lot of stuff going on that I didn’t quite get clear until I did get cancer. My approach to artistry, my approach to all of it, changed. My whole personality changed. What I was striving for changed, how I was critiquing myself, my own harshness I was having with myself changed, so the music became more about inspiring than titillating.”

Self-care was a crucial skill to possess when Etheridge faced personal tragedy in 2020 when her son died, succumbing to an opioid addiction after having been prescribed painkillers for an injury when he was 17. She is as open about that experience as she is about her stories in her show and in Talking to My Angels. During My Window, she tells the story quietly, with the theater lights off, sharing her grief and her belief that her son would want her to be happy.

“A lot of people were concerned about me, and a lot of people share that same experience — losing a loved one to an opioid substance abuse disorder,” she says. “I think I wanted to tell the story in the book, rather than over and over talking to people in interviews and stuff. I think I wanted to really put all the facts out and say, ‘Look, this is what happened right here.’”

Throughout our conversation, Etheridge is both thoughtful and spontaneous, and cerebral and spiritual. Looking back at her life, she appears wise but also youthful and optimistic.

When asked what she would say to herself at 20, she replies, “‘Slow down, and enjoy this right now. It’s all going to go by. Everything you’re worried about now, you’re not even going to remember. So, just enjoy the ride.’ I would say that, but you know what? At 20 years old, we were all consumed with what’s coming instead of being in the now. It takes a little time and wisdom to learn that.”