Rep Departs for Singapore : Theater: The troupe, set to headline the country’s $2.4-million Festival of Arts, will stage two productions.

Even before South Coast Repertory departed Sunday for Singapore on the first international tour in its 26-year history, officials of the Singapore Festival of Arts had to book additional performances of the troupe’s two productions to meet box-office demand.

SCR will stage George Bernard Shaw’s “You Never Can Tell,” opening there Friday at the 904-seat Victoria Theatre for five performances, and Terrence McNally’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” opening June 5 at the 326-seat Drama Center for four performances.

“Both shows are proving to be more popular than we expected, and we are very happy about that,” Mushalwah Ridzwan, a spokeswoman for the monthlong festival, said late last week by telephone.

The SCR entourage of 25 actors, directors and technicians--expected to arrive in Singapore in the early morning hours of Tuesday after a 19-hour, 8,767-mile flight from Los Angeles--is not traveling light. Five tons of stage scenery were shipped by sea in April, and several hundred pounds of costumes and stage props were sent by air a few days before the troupe’s departure.

The Singapore government, which has arranged sponsors to foot the entire bill for SCR’s transportation and accommodations and more than half of the troupe’s direct costs of about $100,000, invited the Tony-winning theater company to be the festival’s opening headliner along with the Singapore Symphony and Sankai Juku, a Japanese contemporary-dance company.

The 12-year-old, biennial arts showcase has been accorded particular significance by the government this year because it dovetails with Singapore’s 25th anniversary of political independence from Malaysia, Ridzwan said. That occasion will be celebrated Aug. 9 by the approximately 2.7 million people who live in the equatorial city-state at the tip of the Malay Peninsula.

Singapore’s bid for the cultural limelight represents a Southeast Asia version of the annual Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, one of Europe’s largest international arts gatherings. At least three dozen theater, dance and music troupes from around the world have been scheduled for the six key venues of the Singapore event, and 250 arts performances have been programmed throughout the city in an elaborate Fringe festival.

Major participants to appear later in June include Japan’s Grand Kabuki theater, the Houston Symphony, New York’s Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Boys Choir of Harlem, the Seattle Mime Theatre, France’s classical Ballet du Nord, Argentine Tango, the Great Moscow Circus and the China Central Ensemble of Music from Beijing.

For SCR, the tour signals “our interest in the Pacific Rim as opposed to Europe,” said producing artistic director David Emmes. “This trip also . . . is a chance to reward many of the founding members of the company with a tremendous experience. Being in another culture can’t help but be invigorating and revitalizing.”

Emmes will stage “You Never Can Tell” with most of the cast that he directed in his production of the play last season on the SCR Mainstage. But despite a year’s worth of planning for the tour, he said he didn’t know until the first rehearsal two weeks ago whether the revival would match his expectations.

“Much to my delight, the energy and excitement of the company came back as if the original run were still on,” Emmes said. “In the old days, we used to bring a play back after two or three weeks. This time I really wasn’t sure how it would go.”

Shaw’s romantic comedy, one of his so-called “plays pleasant,” unfolds in 1896 in an English seaside resort where an expatriate feminist author of how-to books has arrived with her three children: a pair of mischievous twins and their elder sister, also a feminist, whose beauty turns men into putty. Verging on farce at times, the comedy revolves around her courtship by a penniless bachelor dentist.

“The interesting question,” Emmes said, “was this: Having been off so long, how much work should you do to re-create what had been a charming and spirited production? In two weeks of rehearsal, you could take everything apart but not have enough time to put it back together. On the other hand, you don’t want to come back and do it glibly. That would simply be going for effect.

“So you have to strike a balance: Get the show up real fast and yet make it worthwhile. I like to think we’ve done a good job of that. We’ve been able to look at everything with fresh eyes. And we’ve added a few details by weaving a few more pieces of color and texture into what otherwise was an already strong fabric.”

The huge task of loading the production’s scenic elements into the Victoria Theatre--chiefly rotating sets for the exteriors and interiors of both a turn-of-the-century dental office and an elegant Victorian hotel--is to begin Tuesday morning within six hours of the troupe’s scheduled arrival.

The first technical rehearsal, to adjust the show to a proscenium stage instead of the modified thrust of the SCR Mainstage, is set for Wednesday. In the meantime, the troupe will have to shake off its jet lag while facing a barrage of press conferences and official greeters before the Friday premiere.

Emmes described the trip as “a paid vacation,” but at the moment, it sounds like work.

Jan Herman will report from Singapore on SCR’s experiences there.