JUST A BROADWAY BABY: MARY ELLEN ASHLEY Documentary Now Available to Watch

The award-winning short documentary film about the life and career of Mary Ellen Ashley (Broadway: The Innocent Voyage, Annie Get Your Gun with Ethel Merman and Yentl) is now available to screen on YouTube.

After a long film festival circuit run in which the film was nominated at 14 festivals, won eight awards including five Best Documentary Short Awards (Art of Brooklyn, Chain Film Festival, Oregon Documentary Film Festival, Upstate NY Film Festival and New York Long Island Film Festival), Just a Broadway Baby: Mary Ellen Ashley is now available on YouTube. The film was also invited to be part of the permanent archives at New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (TOFT).

"We had been talking to folks at BroadwayHD and several other cable outlets but decided anyone and everyone who wants to see the film should be able to see it easily for free," said Mary Ellen from her home in Los Angeles where she recently tap danced on Let's Make a Deal and had Wayne Brady in stitches, and is currently featured in the film, Thump, which screened at the prestigious Raindance Film Festival in London in June.

The short documentary, directed by award-winning actor, playwright and director Patrick Riviere, follows Ashley's storied career from her Broadway debut in An Innocent Voyage at the age of seven, to being in the original cast of Annie Get Your Gun and growing up with the show for its entire run and then going on to star in radio and early television (cast as the Tootsie Roll Sweetheart on The Tootsie Hippodrome TV show) and then opening for stars in Vegas and ultimately performing some of the biggest roles in the musical theater canon in National and International Tours, Off-Broadway and the best known regional theaters in the country from Maine State Music Theatre and Walnut Street Theater, to Paper Mill Playhouse and the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre, to ArtPark and American Musical Theatre of San Jose to name a few. And that includes starring in over 12 productions of Hello Dolly!

Indie Shorts Magazine had this to say about the film: "Ashley is instantly likeable. Her flair for drama blends with humour to produce excellent theatricality as she recounts the story of how she got her start. "Picket Fences", the sequence that delves into a conflict between career and parenting, best showcases the film's ability to throw in lower tones into the narrative's colourful carousel and have it be richer for it."