Alistair McGowan to Replace Rupert Everett in West End PYGMALION

According to Whatsonstage.com, Rupert Everett will leave the West End production of PYGMALION on August 15 because of previous television commitments. Stepping into the role of Henry Higgins will be Alistair McGowan, who takes over through September 3. The production opened at the Garrick Theatre on May 25.

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McGowan is perhaps best known to British audiences for The Big Impression (formerly Alistair McGowan's Big Impression), which was, for four years, one of BBC1's top-rating comedy programmes - winning numerous awards, including a BAFTA in 2003. He has also worked extensively in theatre and appeared in the West End in Art, Cabaret, The Mikado and Little Shop of Horrors (for which he received an Laurence Olivier Award nomination.) 

The cast of PYGMALION includes: Kara Tointon, Diana Rigg, and also features Peter Eyre and Peter Sandys Clarke as Colonel Pickering, and Freddy Eynsford Hill respectively. Marty Cruickshank and Roberta Taylor also star. The show is being directed by director Philip Prose, who also took part in the Chichester production. 

Pygmalion is by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's gArden Party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a comment on women's independence, packaged as a romantic comedy.

In 1956 it was adapted into Broadway musical My Fair Lady, by Lerner and Loewe. The original production starred Rex Harrison as Higgins and Julie Andrews as Eliza.