RC4 Puppets: A New Kind of Showstopper
RC4 Puppets: A New Kind of Showstopper
Written by Eunice Felicia Jo
RC4 Puppets greeted the college for the very first time at Slumber Party with their debut performance ‘Trick or Treat!’. As part of a Senior Retention (SR) Project, the Halloween comedy skit was met with enthusiastic responses from the audience.
The puppet show follows two girls, Beatrice and Tricia, as they attempt to outsmart the strict Auntie Ribena for extra Halloween treats.
The project had been quietly taking shape for months before that night. It started in the summer of 2025, when the team's creative lead, Charlie, caught a puppet show at the George Town Festival while travelling in Penang.
“The show reminded me that puppetry is not something reserved for children, it can be a very entertaining and accessible artform,” Charlie said. In his fourth year at RC4, Charlie has played a key role in six Theatre@RC4 productions. “I thought it was a good balance between performance and production, and it would be a good thing to explore for our SR Project.”
The idea also had roots closer to our college. Within RC4, Charlie had previously been involved in a lighthearted show with frog characters during an ORC4RE wellness initiative back in 2023. “It was an easy and low-effort way of mass entertainment in the dining hall, and it got a lot of traction from the residents,” Charlie recalled. He believed that a puppet show would have a similar effect. The college's beloved mascot, Oscar the Orca, had also shown that the community had a soft spot for characters with personality.
The team behind RC4 Puppets (Photo: Charleston Chan)
RC4 Puppets is a team effort brought together by a group of friends, each contributing to different aspects of the project. While Charlie drove the creative vision, the team worked together to handle logistics, lighting and sound design, and making the puppets. In ‘Trick or Treat!’, a separate performance team of two narrators and two puppet operators brought the characters to life on stage.
One of those puppet operators was Ridley, who had performed in Theatre@RC4’s Arts Night productions, which are typically longer and more production-intensive. He described ‘Trick or Treat!’ as “something more informal, something different,” adding that in the spirit of Slumber Party, he was able to “let loose and have fun on stage.” For performers like Ridley, the production offered a low-pressure but exciting way to get back on stage. “I had to learn how to operate the puppets in a short amount of time, but I’m happy to entertain,” he said.
Behind the scenes, the script came together in three hours after a sudden burst of inspiration. The making of the puppets, however, was a more challenging process. The team spent weeks cutting, sewing, gluing and problem-solving their way through the construction of near life-sized puppets.
The puppet-making process (Photo: Eunice Felicia Jo)
“There was a pattern that we found online, but we had to scale it up for our puppets. We started by prototyping with smaller versions. There’s a lot of Math and DTK1234 involved here,” Charlie said. Along the way, the team discovered that their chosen glue was slowly corroding the puppets’ Styrofoam ball eyes. On the day of the show, the eyes gradually shrank with every passing hour.
“When you do theatre, you put all the skills together,” Charlie noted. “If you're making props, you might need engineering and physics. If you're sticking things together, you need to know your chemistry. There's a lot of science involved, unexpectedly.”
When ‘Trick or Treat!’ played out in front of a live audience, its shocking ending drew a collective gasp from the crowd. “The best part of any show is when you know that the audience is responding. Even small reactions or laughter at the jokes make you realise they’re catching on to the comedy. It’s quite fulfilling and makes everything worth it,” Ridley shared.
Since then, RC4 Puppets has gone on to appear at Arts Night 2026 with a puppet production based on the musical Wicked, growing in scale and ambition. However, the heart of the project has remained consistent from the beginning. RC4 Puppets has always been about making performance feel fun, approachable, and for everyone. That is the message the team hopes residents can take away from their project.
"We want people to watch and think, that doesn't look difficult at all, and it looks fun!" Charlie said. He believes that puppetry lowers the barrier to performing in a way that traditional theatre sometimes does not. "You just need to want to try, then start by showing up," he said. "If you really want to try something, it's not hard to put yourself out there. Everything here in RC4 is beginner-friendly!"
