VideoWatch Trailer for Award-Winning Short Documentary Just a Broadway Baby: Mary Ellen Ashley
Ashley shared the stage with Ethel Merman in the original Broadway production of Annie Get Your Gun.
By
Andrew Gans
January 26, 2022
Broadway veteran Mary Ellen Ashley, who shared the stage with Ethel Merman in the original production of Annie Get Your Gun, is the subject of the short documentary film, Just a Broadway Baby: Mary Ellen Ashley. Check out the trailer above for the project, which made its world premiere January 22 at the Oregon Documentary Film Festival, winning Best Picture in a field of more than 60 selected films.
The short, also nominated for Best Documentary Short at Green Mountain International Film Festival, will next be screened at Dam Short Film Festival in Boulder City, Nevada.
Actor, arts administrator, and arts educator Patrick Riviere makes his film directorial debut with Just a Broadway Baby, which was edited by Laird Ogden with cinematography and sound by Shane Adams.
Ashley made her Broadway debut as Mary Ellen Glass in An Innocent Voyage in 1943 and then went on to appear in the entire original Broadway run of Annie Get Your Gun. After working in regional theatres throughout the country, she returned to Broadway in Yentl, starring Tovah Feldshuh. Ashley is currently preparing to co-star in a new play with music, Live from the Bardo: My Dinner with Mary, at Theatre for the New City.
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Celebrating Seven Decades of Annie Get Your Gun on Broadway
Filmed in 2023, the one-night-only event featured Brian Stokes Mitchell, Audra McDonald, Peter Friedman, and more from the Ahrens and Flaherty musical's original cast.
Surrounded by period-accurate, 19th-century holiday decorations lit via candlelight, the 70-minute production is based on Dickens' own script of the classic.