By Brooke Lefferts
NEW YORK (AP) --Melissa Etheridge realized two career dreams with her new docuseries "Melissa Etheridge: I'm Not Broken": performing for incarcerated women and recording the concert for a live album.
The singer-songwriter grew up in Leavenworth, Kansas — an area home to a well-known federal penitentiary and other state and military prisons — and when she was starting out, she found a receptive audience in people incarcerated there. Inspired by Johnny Cash's famous prison concerts, the two-time Grammy winner won permission for a live show at the Topeka Correctional Facility, a Kansas women's prison, with a film crew documenting the process.
In the series, which starts streaming on Paramount+ this week, Etheridge meets and corresponds with several people in the prison, learning how they ended up there. Their stories inspired her to write her new song, "A Burning Woman." Many of the women had experienced drug addiction, and Etheridge said she connected with them after her 21-year-old son's 2020 opioid-related death.
Etheridge, 63, spoke recently about her emotional 2023 performance and the new album. Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: How was the experience of meeting the inmates and hearing their stories?
ETHERIDGE: When I went and heard their stories, I was blown away that they were all mothers. That just really broke my heart. And then just how relatable. This could be my sister. This could be my friends. There but for the grace of God go I.
Q: How was realizing your dream of recording a live album?
ETHERIDGE: When I grew up in the '60s and '70s, live albums were it. I mean, "Frampton Comes Alive!" That's what you do if you can get to a point as a rock 'n' roll artist. I always wanted to and by the time I got there in the '90s, they were like, "No, there's no live albums." So finally! And I love this. It's a really special concert. The setlist was curated for them. It had the few hit songs in it, but it had really deep tracks that really dealt with that longing and guilt and pain.
Q: You performed the new song at the live concert and it echoes some of the pain you heard in the inmates' stories. How did it feel to see their supportive response?
ETHERIDGE: It was even more than I thought it would be. That they jumped right on the call-and-response, and that they've got footage of the women saying "I'm not broken!" means everything. Because just saying "I'm not broken," just saying "I'm worth it," that was the whole intention for it. I hope people love it because it's a rockin' song. It's a Melissa Etheridge song. I really like that.
Q: In the series, you play the new song for your wife, TV writer-producer Linda Wallem for feedback. Do you often solicit her opinion on new music?
ETHERIDGE: I love living with a creative woman. I love being married to someone whom I really trust their taste, because she doesn't like a lot of things. She's in entertainment — she's been a director, a producer. She's really used to telling people, "Hey, you might be able to do it a little better" — very famous people. So I know she's not pulling any punches for me. And when she likes (the work) it means a lot to me because I don't really have a lot of people that I can trust and be so raw with. I'm blessed to have a partner like that.
Q: There were several emotional moments in the concert, including when you sang about your son Beckett, who died from an opioid addiction — how was that experience?
ETHERIDGE: Before we walked on stage, I was with the band, and we all kind of huddled together and I just was like, "You know, this is a real dream come true." And I went (mimics crying) "Oh, no, I'm on the edge here. This is not OK!" So I gathered myself together and I was all good until I started talking about that. To see 500 women who have been through more than I'll ever — they've been through their trials and are not with their children. To see them show such empathy and compassion for me, that blew me away.
Q: It's so moving to hear you talk about Beckett. You're so wise and calm about his death in the series — how do you separate your grief, and did surviving cancer help you get clarity in that process?
ETHERIDGE: Plant medicine, plus cancer, and kind of a new outlook on life — and that was 20 years ago — it's really worked for me because I'm very healthy and very happy. The idea that you suffer all your life and then at the end you're going to get some sort of (reward) — that's OK for some people, but I just don't believe that. And that my son is in nonphysical (world), that life doesn't end when we end, that there's something in all of us that is eternal — those things comfort me, and so I believe them. It is the way that I walk through this, and I hope to inspire. But also, it helps me when I can speak directly. And every time I do say to someone, "Yes, he would want me to be happy," I believe that and I know it.
Director Jon M. Chu Discusses “Wicked” Ways, The Beauty Of Musicals
"Musical" has been a dirty word lately in Hollywood marketing, but "Wicked" director Jon M. Chu isn't having it.
Of course, there's no running from the term when you're bringing to the screen one of the most popular Broadway shows of the 21st century, or telling a story so connected to one of the most beloved movie musicals ever, "The Wizard of Oz." But Chu, the 44-year-old filmmaker of 2021's "In the Heights" who as a young man was transported by "Wicked" on the stage, is a true believer in form.
"When words aren't enough, music is the extension of your expression. That's what movies do, and that's what musicals do," says Chu. "When it's tied into their communication of where characters are at in this moment and time, it's the most beautiful thing."
"Wicked," which Universal Pictures will release Nov. 22 in theaters, is one of the fall's biggest gambles not just because it's been split in two (the second "Wicked" film will arrive in fall 2025), but because it's going all-out for a big-screen, song-and-dance spectacular at a time when other films (see "Wonka" and "Mean Girls") have sought to shroud their musical underpinnings.
"Everyone knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, once in a lifetime to make a movie of this scale, of this moment when cinema is being questioned of what place it has in our life," says Chu. "We had to shoot the moon."
"Wicked," written by Winnie Holzman (who penned the book to the musical) and Dana Fox, stars Cynthia Erivo as the green-skinned Elphaba Thropp, who becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, and Ariana Grande as Galinda, the future Good Witch of the South.
Various forms of a "Wicked" movie been in development almost since the Broadway show opened in 2003 — earlier, in fact,... Read More