Why an ICS Bangkok Director Casts for Coachability, Not Talent

Mr. G, the theater arts director at the International Community School of Bangkok, rejects about half the students who audition for the school's fall musical, and by his own account, it's almost never for lack of talent. "It's not that they were bad auditions," he said on this episode of Students Incorporated, describing this year's casting process for Seussical. "It's often that they were just a mark short on maybe one aspect." What he screens for, in order, isn't what most people would guess, and it lines up closely with what a growing body of hiring research says predicts whether a new employee turns out to be a good one.

Singing First, Attitude Second, Talent Last

Ask Mr. G what he looks for in an audition and he answers with a ranked list. Singing comes first: can the student carry a tune, and can they sing in character rather than, as he put it, "just trying to sing pretty." Second is something closer to temperament than skill. "Are they directable? Are they coachable? Do they listen when I give them notes?" he asked, calling it a bigger factor in casting than most people assume. He's turned away students not for missing a note but for resisting one, talking back when corrected instead of adjusting. Dance ranks third. Acting isn't ranked at all, because he doesn't believe it needs to be.

"I believe I can teach anyone how to act."

That doesn't mean effort is optional, he added: trying hard is "the first ingredient" of acting, and the rest can be built from there.

The students who won this year's leads described an audition process that ran on that same logic. Malachi Smith, a senior cast as the Cat in the Hat, went into auditions barely nervous, then decided afterward that this had worked against him. "I think it's really important to be nervous," he said, reasoning that too much calm meant holding back energy rather than committing fully. He said he "barely got the role" as a result. Nishka Gurung, a ninth-grader competing for the part of Gertrude McFuzz, described the opposite problem: she was intimidated during callbacks because everyone else reading for the part was older and more experienced, assuming she had no real chance. She got the role anyway. Neither story is about who sang best. Both are about what a student did with pressure and a note, which is exactly the variable Mr. G says he's grading.

That ordering, coachability ahead of raw ability because ability can be taught and attitude mostly can't, isn't a quirk unique to a Bangkok auditorium. It tracks what corporate hiring research has been converging on for years. In a Forbes column published in July 2026, workplace consultant Shep Hyken reported that nine out of ten business leaders now say life skills, including coachability, emotional intelligence and work ethic, matter more for long-term success than technical or AI skills. A widely cited Sales Executive Council study of thousands of salespeople found that quality coaching improved long-term performance by 19%, but the gains concentrated among employees who were actually receptive to being coached. A separate analysis of more than 45,000 leaders found the most coachable ran teams with roughly two-and-a-half times the employee engagement of the least coachable.

None of that research had a school musical in mind. But Mr. G arrived at nearly the same conclusion on his own, sharpened over repeated seasons of the same decision: given two students of comparable talent, bet on the one who takes a note well.

It also lines up with what employers say directly. In its Job Outlook 2025 survey, the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that roughly 90% of recruiters ranked problem-solving as an essential quality in new hires, with teamwork cited by more than 80% and communication by more than 75%. None of those are technical qualifications. Analysts increasingly call that deliberate: as AI absorbs more routine cognitive work, what's left for a human employee to bring is judgment under ambiguity and the ability to work well with others, neither of which shows up on a resume. A theater audition, it turns out, is one of the few settings outside a job itself where an adult can watch a teenager handle both.

Running Lights and Sound Like a Small Utility

If casting is where the philosophy shows up, the backstage crew is where the scale of the undertaking becomes obvious. For Seussical, the tech team built four hand-painted backdrops, each 15 by five meters, styled to mimic the flat, two-dimensional look of Dr. Seuss's original book illustrations rather than a conventional three-dimensional set. That choice created more work, not less: because the show is styled in two dimensions, nothing could simply be bought and wheeled onstage. Every tree had to be painted onto a backdrop or built from wood by hand, prop by prop.

The lighting rig is its own math problem: more than 50 individual lights, with a single song sometimes calling for five to ten separate cues, meaning much of the rig gets reprogrammed several times within one number. By the crew's own accounting, that adds up to roughly 250 individual settings tracked and executed correctly, live, in sequence, for one song. Training a student to run the board, Mr. G said, means one-on-one instruction with him and a colleague, hours of coaching before that student runs a show alone.

That kind of student-run technical operation is part of why school theater programs are increasingly valued as more than an arts elective. Educators who track technical theater training describe stagecraft courses as a genuine STEM on-ramp: students learn lighting programming, circuitry, rigging and live-event problem-solving under real deadlines, skills that transfer directly into design and stagehand work in college and beyond.

A Choreographer Who Spends Her Days in Admissions

The choreography for Seussical came from Miss Liz, whose full-time job at ICS is head of admissions. She's choreographed the school's musicals as what she calls a "for fun" role on the side since joining ICS in 2016, building on a dance background that started with living-room shows for her parents and grew into nearly two decades choreographing high schools, community theaters and show choirs in the United States before she moved to Bangkok.

Her method for picking a dance captain mirrors Mr. G's casting philosophy: technical skill matters, but so does whether a student can lead a rehearsal competently in her absence, since dance captains are expected to run practice sections on their own. Managing both jobs, she said, comes down to a discipline that sounds like what workplace coaches call time-blocking: admissions work during the school day, rehearsals after school, family time walled off once she gets home, and a fixed bedtime, because "without rest, we get sick and nothing works."

Two Nights, No Retakes

Unlike a sports season, which gives a team a dozen chances to improve across several months, a musical compresses everything into two performances after roughly four months of preparation. "We have four months leading up to two nights. And that's it," Miss Liz said. "You get two nights that you're pouring everything into... that's your only chance."

That structure, months of preparation collapsing into a pass-fail weekend with no partial credit for a missed lighting cue or a dropped line, is arguably a more honest preview of adult work than most school assignments offer. It also explains why Mr. G's casting math holds up: under that kind of pressure, the student most likely to thrive isn't necessarily the most naturally gifted one in the room. It's the one who can hear "fix that thing" from a director mid-rehearsal and just fix it, a skill that, unlike a solo or a dance break, doesn't disappear once the curtain closes.

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