Seventeen songs fill the evening, which in the orthodoxy of the form has Kansas-born Etheridge narrating her rise from singer in the early-bird slot in Midwestern restaurants to performing before thousands in stadiums. She also shares a lot about coming out as a lesbian in 1993, at an inaugural ball for President Bill Clinton, and the ups and downs of relationships that produced four children and no small amount of romantic heartache.
She talks candidly, too, about the 2021 death of her 21-year-old son Beckett as a result of an opioid addiction, including his use of fentanyl.
Little of her narrative — written with TV producer-writer Linda Wallem Etheridge, whom she married in 2014 — has not been elucidated before in interviews. What remains fresh is her music and her relish in singing it. Roaming Bruce Rodgers’s set, framed by a screen projecting Olivia Sebesky’s elaborate images and graphics, Etheridge invests full-throated passion in versions of “Juliet,” “I Want to Come Over,” “Open Your Mind” and most exhilaratingly, “Nowhere to Go,” the last song from her 1995 album, “Your Little Secret.” (The lighting by Abigail Rosen Holmes offers intimations of rock concert panache.)
“If you know my songs — very dramatic,” Etheridge says of her musical catalogue, performed here without backup. A virtue of “Melissa Etheridge: My Window” is the degree to which the drama contains the story of a truly self-made artist. With the help of Kate Owens, who plays the practical role of roadie, switching out the singer’s guitars and doing little bits of second-banana shtick, Etheridge gives a sort of primer on discipline and will power. These qualities this rocker possesses in abundance.
It took her years of grinding out a marginal career, trying out for — and impressing — owners of small clubs here and there, before hitting real pay dirt. She name-checks Chris Blackwell of Island Records for having come to one of her sets and quickly deciding to produce her work. The moment sounds as if it was well-earned.
Understandably, Etheridge wants to trumpet all she’s earned, but does she really need to tell us she’s won Grammys and an Oscar (for “I Need to Wake Up” from the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”)? Owens trots out replicas of the awards and places them onstage, little self-congratulatory bits that do not enhance the performance.
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.
At one point, she noticed a woman in a front-row seat in big clunky boots, resembling the pair she herself was wearing. Etheridge knelt down, slung the woman’s leg onto her shoulder and serenaded her. It was indeed very dramatic, in the exuberant way only a rock star in sync with her crowd could pull off.
Melissa Etheridge: My Window, by Melissa Etheridge, with Linda Wallem Etheridge. Directed by Amy Tinkham. Sets, Bruce Rodgers; projection, Olivia Sebesky; lighting, Abigail Rosen Holmes; costumes, Andrea Lauer, sound, Shannon Slaton. About 2½ hours. At Circle in the Square, 235 W. 50th St., New York. melissaetheridge.com.