BIO

Ann Morrison is an award-winning actress, writer, teacher, and director for over 45 years. She began acting in summer stock as a teenager near Chicago and studied at HB Studios in New York before taking a gig at 19 with Korean big band leader Benny Kim, touring the midwest with his family as singer, MC and trombone player in The Benny Kim Show. She then apprenticed at the Burt Reynolds Institute for Theater Training in Florida where she was cast as the Girl in The Fantasticks, earned her Equity card with The Sound of Music, and appeared on Dinah Shore's daytime TV show Dinah! when Reynolds co-hosted and predicted on national TV that Ann would be appearing on Broadway within a year (it would be 2).

 

Back in New York as a professional, she was cast in a re-working of Alfred Uhry and Robert Waldman's Swing. Renamed and reduced to 3 characters, Dream Time played at the Harold Clurman Theater Off Broadway. Ann did regional theater productions of Babes In Arms and Grease before being cast as Mabel Normand in a new musical Keystone at Geva Theatre in Rochester, NY. Director/choreographer Ron Field saw her in the production and suggested casting director Joanna Merlin see her for Mary Flynn, the only role still not filled in Merrily We Roll Along headed for Broadway. After meeting with legendary director Harold Prince, and singing for Stephen Sondheim on her 25th birthday, Ann was cast.

 

Her Broadway debut in Merrily We Roll Along garnered her the 1982 Theatre World Award, and she did her first OBC LP recording for RCA. She did an SRO concert at The New Ballroom and a month later married Blake Walton.

In 1983, she joined the original cast of Forbidden Broadway Off-Broadway, playing Mary Martin, Carol Channing, Julie Andrews, and Patti Lupone, appeared on the TV show MERV, and recreated her Keystone performance as Mabel Normand when it was filmed for NJ Public TV. A year later she starred on London's West End originating the title role in the new musical Peg (based on “Peg O’ My Heart”). Peg was recorded by TER.

She was pregnant when returning to New York and after giving birth to her beautiful Huckleberry, she recorded Richard Rodgers' last musical I Remember Mama with George Hearn and Sally Ann Howes. Then she originated the role of Lizzie in the musical Goblin Market, Off Broadway, for which she received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Actress in a Musical and a Best Plays Citation for Best Actress.

 

She starred in the West Coast premiere of Anyone Can Whistle in L.A. and in an East Coast tour of the revised Peg, now titled Peg O' My Heart, the musical. Nationally, she has starred in Sondheim on Sondheim, Moving On, Into the Woods, Peter Pan, Guys & Dolls, Cabaret, Oliver! Sunset Boulevard, On A Clear Day, Anything Goes, Can Can, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Good News!, Embarrassments, On The Verge, Noel & Gertie, Shadowlands, Ruthless!, I Do, I Do! Little Shop Of Horrors, Chess, Blithe Spirit, Of Thee I Sing, Driving Miss Daisy, plus many many more.

 

After a 2002 Merrily We Roll Along Reunion Concert at Laguardia High School in NY, and a Sondheim celebration, Children and Art at the New Amsterdam Theater, Harold Prince brought her back to Broadway in 2007 for LoveMusik.

 

The quintessential solo artist, Ann won a 2012 United Solo Best Actress Award for her solo play Linda Lovely Goes to Broadway in the United Solo Festival in NYC and appeared there again with her solo playWord Painting: Soliloquies Around an Easel. Ann has performed as a cabaret artist in major venues across the country and in London, most often returning to her favorite haunt 54 Below in NYC, where she has performed as a guest artist in several different series and in her own shows, Now You Know: Annie, and Lenny and Steve, My Furniture Set, and most recentlyAnn Morrison: Merrily From Center Stage, for which she was honored with the 2023 Bistro Award for Best Solo Musical. Merrily From Center Stage will be filmed in L.A as a special in 2024.

 

Directing credits include both her solo playTrevor's Fire starring Blake Walton and his solo play Leading Men at the United Solo Festival; large musicals The Secret Garden, Merrily We Roll Along, On A Clear Day, Smoke On the Mountain as well as many plays and revues. She is the Co-founder and Artistic Director of Sarasolo Productions, which celebrates solo theatre artists.

 

Her original cast recordings and studio recordings include Merrily We Roll Along (GRAMMY Nom.), Peg, Goblin Market, Good News, I Remember Mama, Lady Be Good (1993 Gramophone Award), The Busby Berkeley Album, Sing Before Breakfast, and The Road to Ruin. She is the recipient of several HANDY, SAMMY, and SARASOTA MAGAZINE Awards as well as the JOHN RINGLING TOWERS AWARD, and in 2020 The Florida Theatre Conference recognized her for Outstanding Contribution to Florida Professional Theatre. Ann plays herself in the 2017 documentary Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened. 

 

Ann is the very proud mother of singer/composer/actor/music producer Huck Walton.

wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Morrison .