The Magic Trick Behind Mr. G's Final ICS Theater Show

The director of ICS's production of Wind in the Willows has a one-line answer for what actually makes a show come together, and it isn't talent. "No one's going to magically clean up for you," he tells his tech crew. "No one's going to magically build that thing. You build it." On this episode of Students Incorporated, co-hosts James and Highlight sat down with the cast of the school's musical and then with its director, known on the show as Mr. G, for what turned out to be his last production at the school.

Eight Years, One Comeback From Nothing

Asked to pick a career highlight across his time directing ICS theater, Mr. G didn't point to a single performance. He pointed to a trajectory. His run started with more dramatic, "serious acting" shows, including Lord of the Flies, 1984, and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and built from there. The talent audiences see now, he said, isn't a fluke: "It's not based off like, oh wow, they're so talented. No, they built that like over years and years of the program just building on itself." Part of what he's proudest of is that the growth wasn't only his doing: older students kept reaching down to teach the younger ones, a pipeline of leadership that kept regenerating itself.

That pipeline nearly broke. When the program went online during COVID, he said, everything got harder. What he's most attached to is what came after: the program "rising back from the ashes like a firebird."

The Real Magic Trick Isn't Talent, It's Overtime

Pressed on which show was hardest to direct, Mr. G resisted picking one, because each was difficult in its own register. Arturo Ui was emotionally and politically loaded: the actors were, in his words, "literally pretending to be Hitler," which meant navigating the nuance of staging something that political without it landing the wrong way. The play itself is built for exactly that kind of discomfort. Bertolt Brecht wrote it in three weeks in 1941 while fleeing Nazi Germany, disguising Hitler's rise as a Chicago gangster's takeover of the vegetable trade, with each character mapped directly onto a real Nazi official; Brecht's own stage directions call for signs naming the historical parallel outright as the play unfolds, so audiences can't mistake the satire for a straightforward gangster story. Staging a decades-old political allegory with teenagers was never going to be simple material. Wind in the Willows, by contrast, was easier on the acting side (his cast could lean on physical technique they already had), but brutal on the technical side: three boats, two trains, two cars, and "a ridiculous amount of tech construction."

Different shows, different problems, same fix. "The magic trick, for all theater," he said, "is overtime."

No one's going to magically clean up for you, or no one's going to magically build that thing. You build it.

He traced that ethic back to his own adolescence, when schoolwork came easily enough that he coasted through it, until life started surrounding him with challenges he actually had to work at. That's the same lesson he says he now repeats to his tech crew, word for word.

Micro-Goals Are Just Career Advice Wearing a Costume

Asked what he'd tell current and future student actors, Mr. G credited the advice to comedian and Matilda the Musical writer Tim Minchin: set micro-goals instead of long-term ones. The line traces to a specific, widely circulated speech: Minchin's 2013 address at the University of Western Australia, later published as "9 Life Lessons," where he told graduates to practice "passionate, dedication to the pursuit of short-term goals," urging them to "be micro-ambitious" and work with pride on whatever is directly in front of them rather than chasing a single grand dream. Mr. G described walking a student through that same logic in practice: a goal as small as "I want to be able to cry on stage this semester" gets broken down further still, starting with whether the student is even comfortable with sadness in the first place.

The reasoning goes past acting. Long-term goals, he argued, make people miss what's directly in front of them. He offered his own life as the example: while working as a barista during his university years, a customer he was serving asked, "You want to follow me around?" That customer turned out to be the creative director of a theater. He said yes on the spot, purely because he happened to be free. "If I'd been focused on just finishing my degree," he said, "I would have been focused on my grades and not picked up that opportunity." He called the skills he built by staying loose more meaningful than the ones tied to finishing that degree.

What the Cast Was Actually Practicing

The students who joined James and Highlight for the first segment (Josiah, Layla, Sibel, Ginny, and Talent) described a more technical version of the same idea: character work as a set of learnable, physical skills rather than an innate gift. One cast member, playing Badger, said the role clicked into place once they built the character's physicality around a cane. Another, covering both a barge woman and a rabbit, kept the two roles distinct using Laban movement analysis and the seven levels of tension associated with theater pedagogue Jacques Lecoq: variations in speed and weight, they said, did more to separate the characters than anything psychological. Both frameworks are staples of professional actor training rather than a student's improvisation. Laban movement analysis, developed by the Hungarian movement theorist Rudolf Laban, breaks physical action down into effort, space, time, and weight to uncover the nuance behind even small gestures, and Lecoq's own Paris-based theater school, founded in 1956 and still running today, built its two-year conservatory around exactly the same vocabulary of tension, rhythm, and physical precision the ICS cast member was describing. A cast member playing a stoat described studying videos of the actual animal to find its physicality, explaining that "if you are acting as an animal, by looking at their pictures and videos, you can get a more clear sense of how they act in their everyday life."

The reported struggles were just as specific: one actor singled out nailing a convincing British accent ("I don't want to do just a British accent. I want to sound like a native speaker") and hitting notes that felt out of reach until, in a recent rehearsal, they weren't. Talent, a senior and the show's dance captain in this, their final year in that role, said the most rewarding part wasn't a performance at all, but simply watching students across every grade rehearse and dance together, a sight school hallways don't usually offer. Another cast member, also serving as assistant director and part of the tech team on top of three AP classes, described the balancing act plainly as a struggle to hold musical, academic, and personal life together at once.

Two Songs, and What Leaving Actually Feels Like

Asked what from the show felt personally resonant as he closed this chapter, Mr. G named two songs. The first, "A Friend Is Still a Friend," lines up with how he thinks about his own life: divided into chapters that end without the whole book closing, which is why he still makes a point of meeting former students wherever they've scattered to, alumni included.

The second, "A Place to Come Back To," is about leaving a home and eventually returning to it. That one, he said, "always makes me a little choked up," because he knows he'll eventually fly back to Thailand as a visitor rather than as staff, watching from a distance as a new school year starts without him. What's next is genuinely unsettled: he mentioned the faster pace of the European job market, the possibility of teaching college-level theater, an interest in pursuing a PhD, and more time for the music he already releases independently on his own YouTube channel. None of it is decided. What he did leave decided, on his way out, was the case for small goals over grand ones, and the reminder that nothing on a stage builds itself.

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