The Pandemic Gap Behind ICS Bangkok's Shrek Production

Backstage at the International Community School of Bangkok, a puppet dragon nearly five meters long waited for its cue days before opening night. It had taken the student tech crew months to build, prop by prop, because almost nothing about this production could simply be bought. That detail turned out to be one of the clearest signs of a bigger story running underneath ICS Bangkok's November 2022 staging of Shrek the Musical: a theater program working overtime to close a gap that two pandemic years had opened.

Mr. Gershom, the theater director students call Mr. G, was three years into an unusually complicated stretch of directing when he sat down with Students Incorporated, the school's student-run podcast, to talk about the show. His most candid answer wasn't about the jokes or the five-meter puppet. It was about who was in the cast. A number of the production's younger performers, he said, were only in their first or second show ever, a shortage of stage time traceable directly to COVID-19, which had cut off much of the normal path a student takes from a small classroom role to a mainstage lead. "Because we had COVID, they just had less opportunities to try out," he said. "At the beginning, particularly, they were having to keep up with the high schoolers, which in the past wasn't as big of an issue."

That line describes something schools worldwide are still sorting out. Nearly 1.1 billion learners globally had their education disrupted by pandemic-era school closures, according to UNESCO figures cited in a 2020 analysis by OnlineEducation.com, and theater, a form built on being physically present with an audience, had almost nothing to fall back on once classrooms went remote. A math class can limp along over video call; a scene partner cannot really rehearse blocking, timing, or a dance number through a screen. For students who were nine, ten, or eleven when in-person rehearsals stopped, the disruption never showed up on a standardized test. It surfaced years later, in a rehearsal room, as a gap between a freshman lead and the high schoolers around them who simply had more years of practice.

Building a Dragon From Scratch, Not Off a Shelf

Mr. G described the technical side of Shrek as harder than anything he had directed before, not because of its scale but because so little of it could be purchased ready-made. "There are props that are on for five seconds, and we have to build them by hand, and there's a lot of them," he said. "Whereas other shows, you buy them, and that's it." The dragon puppet, the production's signature technical challenge at five meters long, had to be engineered from nothing, alongside dozens of smaller handmade pieces, down to a single prop flute that needed to hold up through repeated performances.

Large-scale, hand-built puppetry is its own specialized craft in professional theater, for exactly this reason. The National Theatre's Handspring Puppet Company spent eight months building the life-size horse puppets for its production of War Horse, which has since been seen by more than five million people worldwide. Those puppets were constructed from cane, leather, and aircraft cable by a team of 14 craftspeople working in Cape Town, with an aluminum spine strong enough to carry a rider. ICS Bangkok's student tech crew was working at a fraction of that budget and without professional fabricators, but the underlying task, solving a design and engineering problem on a hard deadline, building something that has to survive multiple live performances, was the same discipline in miniature. One cast member put it simply, describing the crew as "miracle workers" who "get stuff done in record time."

Comedy Has to Be Engineered, Too

Mr. G's other read on what set this show apart from past productions had nothing to do with props. It was comedic timing. Unlike the more dramatic shows he had staged before, Shrek asked young actors to treat humor as a technical skill rather than a feeling. "Everything is scripted," he said, "even audience interactions are actually scripted, but they're just good at improvising in between those scripted moments." He described coaching actors on scale, telling one performer that a gesture which felt enormous to perform still would not register for the person sitting "all the way at the back."

The cast's own accounts backed that up in specifics. Hudson Smith, cast as Shrek, had to build a Scottish accent from scratch and learn to sing in it, on top of vocal lessons to hit a rock register the role demanded. Another performer described playing Lord Farquaad, a role traditionally staged on an actor's knees to appear short, and the physical toll of walking, dancing, and singing an entire show that way, even with padding. A cast member playing Fiona in her human form described stretching her vocal range further than she ever had, going through voice lessons daily to get there before opening night. None of it was incidental to the comedy. In Mr. G's account, all of it was the joke's infrastructure.

Research on youth theater backs up how much can ride on that kind of demanding rehearsal process, beyond the show itself. A 2017 evaluation of an after-school musical theater program for at-risk middle schoolers, cited by the theater-technology company On The Stage, found participants showed measurable gains in confidence, creativity, resiliency, responsibility, and collaboration. Separate research drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health found students who studied the arts were 20% less likely to receive an out-of-school suspension for each year of arts study, a pattern researchers connect to the discipline and accountability built into rehearsal culture.

A Directing Philosophy Built on Blunt Notes

Every cast member interviewed converged on the same advice for a student considering a future show: listen to Mr. G, especially when the note stings. One cast member summarized his directing philosophy in a single line he said he'd carried with him:

Don't make me tell you it's too little. Make me tell you it's too much.

The idea, as cast members described it, was to commit fully to a scene rather than hold back and wait to be told to bring more, because dialing a performance down is a far easier note to act on than manufacturing energy that was never there in the first place. Another cast member put the underlying trust plainly: Mr. G "doesn't expect us to be perfect. He just wants us to give our best, because he knows that our best is what he wants."

That kind of direct, high-expectation feedback loop is a documented feature of strong performing-arts instruction, not just one director's quirk. In a 2019 Forbes interview, University of Arizona theater faculty Hank Stratton and Ted Kraus described the performing arts as offering young people "a series of sprints" that build a growth mindset, built on rehearsal debriefs that ask directly what worked and what didn't without softening the answer. "It's a lifelong habit of cultivating improvement without anxiety," Stratton said of the process. Mr. G's version of it, refined over what one cast member described as five years of working with some of the same students, runs on similar logic: blunt feedback lands as investment rather than judgment once trust has been built across multiple productions.

What the Audience Won't See

None of this would have been obvious to the audience filling seats for ICS Bangkok's performances on November 17 and 18. What they saw was a joke-dense adaptation of a familiar movie, a cast in full costume and makeup, and a large puppet built almost entirely by hand. What the cast and crew knew, and what their director was most candid about in the days before opening, is that getting a group of teenagers, some of them just two years removed from an empty stage, to that point took more rebuilding than the script alone ever required.

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