Lynn Ruth Miller won the TO&ST Award at this year’s Edinburgh Festival
Granny’s Gone Wild won the TO&ST Award at this year’s Edinburgh Festival and I am both humbled and honored. I am beginning to realise what it actually takes to win a huge award like this one and I know now that I was the smallest member of the equation.
The one thing that had nothing to do with winning this kind of recognition is luck. The material used in Granny’s Gone Wild has been in the making for almost 10 years. It is a compilation of writing I have done ever since I began my comedy career.
Why then, did this writing, which has been presented year after year, never won anything so huge before? The answer is that it took that long to refine the material I had created so that it had universal rather than a local appeal. The Edinburgh Festival has international audiences and the secret of making a splash there is to tune in to the human experience. It isn’t enough to relate to an American or a British mentality. People from every culture have to respond to what you are saying. This year, that is what my words did.
“My stand-up comedy and my sense of the outrageous appealed to Bill Smith”
The major element in creating a successful show is having someone who not only believes in you but is willing to invest in your talent. For me, that person is Bill Smith. Two years ago, Bill saw Ageing Is Amazing, my musical about the joy of ageing. My stand-up comedy and my sense of the outrageous appealed to him enough to make him offer to help me put together a show that featured the best of what I had been doing for the past ten years.
Bill added his own songs and with Julian Tardo orchestrated my songs; Bill enlisted Tom Phelan an outstanding pianist to play on stage and Val Aviv to create visuals to back up the songs I sang.
The result was Granny’s Gone Wild… but not in its present form. Each time we performed the show in Brighton Festival we modified the order, the text, the pace and the costuming. In August, we took the result to the Edinburgh Festival.
It was there that Richard Daniels came into the picture. He helped create a seamless technical performance and coordinated the videos. Karen Rosie came along to help us with the promotion.
I would love to say it was I who won the TO&ST award. But, in reality, I was only the one who performed it. It was the effort of countless people who felt the message was worth telling, that made Granny’s Gone Wild a winner.
Winning isn’t everything but
The will to win is everything.
– Vince Lombardi
