The Scoring System ICS Bangkok Uses to Cast Aladdin Fairly

Every year at the International Community School of Bangkok, more than 150 students audition for the fall musical, and the person directing that show has almost no say in who gets cast. Mr. Gersom, the ICS theater director behind this fall's production of Disney's Aladdin, built the casting process specifically to keep it that way: a rotating panel of 15 adjudicators (five judging acting, five judging dance, five judging singing) scores every audition, and the tallies decide the cast rather than his own taste. On an episode of the school's student-produced podcast, Students Incorporated, Mr. Gersom and four members of the Aladdin cast explained why a program built around teenage volunteers polices its casting with the rigor of an audit.

"Don't Talk to Me"

The bias Mr. Gersom is guarding against isn't really his own: it's everyone else's lobbying on a favorite's behalf. Well-meaning teachers, he said, regularly approach him during audition season to suggest a student for a role. His response is to refuse the conversation outright. "I just literally will look at them and go, don't talk to me, and walk away," he said, adding that what he's protecting is "zero filter of judgment" reaching him before the scores are finalized.

That's the logic behind spreading the decision across 15 judges instead of one. "There is no way that everyone in that room likes you on a personal level," Mr. Gersom said. "It's statistically highly improbable." Because scores are averaged across five people per discipline, a student who doesn't get a role can be told exactly why, in numbers rather than vibes: he described explaining to one auditioner that a same-build, same-height competitor got the part because "he scored two points higher than you." Second-round callbacks add a more human variable, chemistry between actors playing opposite each other, but the elimination round runs entirely on the rubric. As he put it, describing what the system is designed to prevent:

It's not whoever, you know, buys Mr. G bubble tea who's getting the parts.

The system also does quieter work: making sure the same students don't lock down every lead year after year. Mr. Gersom said he'll occasionally overrule a strong score on purpose, not because a returning favorite scored badly, but to hand a supporting lead to someone new when a former lead is clearly talented enough to earn a role either way. This year's Aladdin, senior Noah, and Jasmine, 10th grader Ella, were both newer to leading roles; Julius, a senior playing the Genie, and Josiah, an 11th grader playing Jafar, rounded out the four principals who joined the podcast to discuss the run-up to opening night.

An Idea With Precedent, and a Real Debate Behind It

Mr. Gersom didn't build his system with labor economists in mind, but it lands inside a real body of research on de-biasing evaluation. The best-known version is a 2000 study in the American Economic Review by Harvard economist Claudia Goldin and Princeton economist Cecilia Rouse, which tracked more than 14,000 real orchestra auditions from roughly 1950 through the 1990s and found that when orchestras adopted screens hiding the player's identity, women's odds of advancing past preliminary rounds rose sharply, a result widely credited with helping explain the rise in female orchestra musicians over that period, and cited for years afterward as a textbook case for blind evaluation.

The finding has a real asterisk, though: Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman published a widely discussed 2019 critique arguing the paper's own data, once re-examined, told a murkier story. In a smaller subset of musicians who auditioned both blind and unblind, screens appeared to help women in early rounds but men in later ones, with no result strong enough to support a clean conclusion either way. The debate hasn't overturned the underlying intuition that removing personal judgment changes outcomes; it's more a reminder that even a famous study can get simplified into something more certain than the data shows.

More recent hiring research backs a version of the same intuition. Analyses summarized by SHRM and drawn from meta-analytic work in the Journal of Business and Psychology found that standardized interviews (the same questions and scoring rubric applied to every candidate) cut bias effects by more than half compared with freeform conversations, with some studies putting the reduction as high as 85% when a fixed rubric is paired with a larger, more diverse panel. That's structurally close to what's happening in the ICS theater room: identical criteria applied to every auditioner, a panel large enough that no single juror's taste can carry a decision, and scores specific enough to be defended out loud. Mr. Gersom doesn't talk about it in the language of a hiring consultant; he talks about killing "rumor" rather than bias. But the mechanics he landed on independently are close to what workplaces are now told to adopt on purpose.

What Gets Built Gets Reused

The same do-it-honestly instinct shows up in how the show gets physically built. Mr. Gersom said ICS students construct nearly everything themselves for their productions (sets, props, the physical world of the show), with adult involvement mostly limited to safety oversight. For Aladdin, that meant building something like "a mini... mud and wood housing" from scratch, plus hand-built animal props and practical special effects designed to work at close range in a school auditorium.

What happens after the run is just as deliberate. Rather than scrapping the set, the crew tears it down for salvage: plywood from a past production of Joseph got reused for Aladdin, stage platforms carried over from an earlier run of Oliver!, and costume pieces (including pants) recycled from Shrek. "It's more work. It's much harder," Mr. Gersom said of the choice. "Knocking it all down would be faster and easier... but maybe some things in life just have to be harder because it's better for everyone." A family member working in trade-show construction around Bangkok reportedly discards nearly everything after a single one-week expo, including brand-new televisions and furniture bought fresh for each show, because storing it costs more than replacing it.

That instinct, treating set materials as a resource to be circulated rather than trashed after one use, mirrors a push that's become increasingly organized in professional theater. The Broadway Green Alliance, founded in 2008 with the Natural Resources Defense Council, runs a committee to get designers building sets from recycled materials and planning an "end-of-use" path for every element before it's built, alongside recurring drives that have diverted tens of thousands of pounds of textiles from landfills. A volunteer-run high school theater program and a Tony-winning industry group arrived at the same conclusion from opposite directions: reuse is more labor, and it's worth it anyway.

Licensing a Disney title layers its own cost on top of that labor. School productions of Disney musicals run through Disney Theatrical Licensing, with fees scaled to a venue's seating capacity, ticket prices, and number of performances, a real enough expense that, as Mr. Gersom explained, adding an unplanned third show after the first two sold out meant paying Disney's licensing office an additional fee just for the right to open more seats.

A Fair System, a Bittersweet Run

For Julius and Noah, both seniors, Aladdin doubles as a closing chapter. Julius called it "my closure play," saying he doesn't expect to act again after graduation, and Noah described the emotional pull of the show's best-known number, "A Whole New World," as the production's turning point. Advice for an audience walking in with only the animated film in mind came from one of the cast, unprompted: "to fully understand Aladdin... you can't take it at face value." None of that sentiment runs through a scoring rubric. But the fact that the show gets to exist at all, for a rotating cast of new faces every year rather than the same students repeating leads, is the part of the system Mr. Gersom built on purpose.

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