SCR IN SINGAPORE : ‘You Never Can Tell’ Magically Becomes a Triumph : Drama: The production seemed to come together well, actually playing better abroad than at home in Costa Mesa.

South Coast Repertory’s production of “You Never Can Tell” was not built to travel. At least, that’s what various members of the Costa Mesa troupe have been saying for months.

How wrong they were. George Bernard Shaw travels beautifully, even to the Equator.

You could tell from the bright laughter--punctuated by a few moments of rapt silence--at the Victoria Theatre here during the Southeast Asia premiere of his romantic comedy. The SCR production, seen last year in Costa Mesa, opened the Singapore Festival of Arts on Friday.

Gone was the slightly brittle, sun-drenched elegance of the show’s first outing on the SCR Mainstage. In its place was a heartier charm, more buoyant for being less forced. What had all the makings of a dull revival under difficult logistic conditions--to judge from one of the final Singapore rehearsals--was turned by some miracle of stage magic into a very real triumph.

“You know they’re not British, but it doesn’t matter,” Mary Rose Gasmier, a veteran playgoer, said during the intermission. “I like the fact that they’re getting the maximum humor out of it. There is no attempt at realism. And that is deliberate.”

Caroline Chan, sitting next to her in the orchestra, concurred: “I don’t know much about the theater, but this is great fun.”

A particularly responsive chord was struck by Shaw’s sendup of turn-of-the-century British manners. The appreciative audience, surrounded by reminders of Singapore’s British colonial history, welcomed the wicked Shavian barbs about class status, paternalism, women’s rights, male chauvinism, convention, religion, marriage and love.

Shaw himself might have taken pleasure in the knowledge that he was tweaking English mores under the bronze nose of the Sir Stamford Raffles, the revered Englishman who founded Singapore in 1819 as an outpost for the British East India Co. A statue of Raffles, standing with his arms folded across his chest, gazes from the theater entrance toward the harbor just beyond the Singapore Cricket Club.

“You Never Can Tell,” which verges on farce at times, unfolds in 1896 in an English seaside resort where an expatriate feminist author of how-to books, Mrs. Clandon, has arrived from Madeira with her three children: the irrepressibly candid twins, Dolly and Philip, and their elder sister, Gloria, also a feminist, whose attractions turn young men into putty.

The plot has two main threads. One is the twins’ discovery of their long-lost father, the grumpy Fergus Crampton, who is living in the town. The other is the pursuit of Gloria by one of the smitten: Valentine, a bachelor dentist without a penny to his name.

But it was the Shavian byplay about 20th-Century self-improvement that struck closest to home with the Singapore audience. Mrs. Clandon has written a popular series of so-called 20th-Century Treatises, without which “no household is complete,” Philip mocks. They are entitled “20th-Century Conduct,” “20th-Century Principles,” “20th-Century Children,” and so on.

Apart from its colonial history, Singapore is a city that takes pride in its modernity. It has a formidable skyline of sleek skyscrapers and everywhere construction workers are putting up more. Day or night, the sound of pneumatic drills tearing up the pavement never stops.

Even the Victoria Theatre, originally built in 1862 as the Singapore Town Hall, was being improved with fresh paint and concrete the night before the premiere. Playgoers had to cross open trenches on plywood planks to get into the theater, which was entirely surrounded by metal construction barriers and temporarily idled backhoes just waiting to get back to work.

The SCR production was not without some problems. For one thing, set designer Cliff Faulkner’s graceful, white clouds, which had embodied the elegance of the first production, could not be shipped because of their steel ribbing. And so he made a different sky of soft-sculpture clouds. Though beautiful in their own right, these lacy substitutes nevertheless looked like giant bloomers hung out to dry in the rafters.

Another noticeable problem was the lighting. It lacked the requisite brightness and specificity at times--and no amount of manipulation by lighting designer Peter Maradudin could cure that because the theater simply didn’t have the power. Also, the Victoria stage is considerably more narrow than the SCR Mainstage, which diminished the expansive sweep of the original.

As for the actors, they were still adjusting on opening night to the theater’s boxy acoustics. A lingering echo sometimes swallowed their words and occasionally whole lines. But it was astonishing to see how comfortable they had become. Or so it seemed.

John-David Keller gave a wonderfully comic performance as the formidably nasty Crampton. Sally Spenser shined as Gloria with a poised, far more sympathetic portrayal than she gave in Costa Mesa. For the first time, it became clear why Valentine is so smitten.

Tom Harrison as Valentine milked some of the evening’s liveliest laughter by delivering his stentorian lines with impeccable timing . He, too, seemed better than before. His declamations no longer sounded squeezed out. Sally Kemp turned in a patrician, authoritative portrayal of Mrs. Clandon, as usual.

Both Jennifer Flacket and Daniel Bright romped as the twins. Don Took made a fine fool of a solicitor. And Karen Hensel, as the parlor maid, showed there is no role too small to benefit from lovely detail work.

Meanwhile, Hal Landon put on a delicate performance as the wise and sensitive Waiter that rivaled I.M. Hobson’s award-winning portrayal in Costa Mesa. The character in Landon’s hands seemed less bemused and more readable. He clarified the play in a way Hobson didn’t.

Richard Doyle, playing the all-knowing Bohun for the first time (in place of John-Frederick Jones from the original), gave another of his immensely poised performances.