Review: Melissa Etheridge’s ‘My Window’ Is a Super Broadway Concert, Not Theater

As a Broadway concert, Melissa Etheridge’s My Window (Circle in the Square, booking through Nov. 19) is a stirring pleasure, from when she first emerges to belt “Like the Way I Do.” But as a piece of theater, My Window is variable—the storytelling running the gamut from compelling to lackadaisical. Etheridge’s warmth and wit are the show’s grace notes and saving graces. “I’m so dramatic,” she drawls after finishing that first song.

Severely off-putting—the Grammy and Oscar-winning Etheridge is such a consummate performer she mostly transcends it—is the terrible use of Circle in the Square. The singer-songwriter, who wrote the show with wife Linda Wallem-Etheridge (it played off-Broadway last year at New World Stages), is rightly proud to be on Broadway—and her adoring fans applaud this success when she mentions it—but the staging is a drearily unimaginative use of such a unique space for theater. For most of the show, Etheridge sings from a conventionally placed stage at the back of the venue, meaning the in-the-round audience is straining and tilting necks and bodies to see her.

Occasionally, Etheridge comes out to sing from a small plinth in the center of the venue—great, that is exactly where she should hold forth from in the venue—but all too soon she wends her way back to the faraway stage. Perhaps this odd physical positioning is because the walls behind her serve as a backdrop of projected images from her past—an affectingly curated scrapbook beginning with her childhood and running through her musical success—but it feels a waste of space, when Etheridge should, quite literally, be center stage.

Read more at The Daily Beast.