All of London's His Stage

By J.F.O. McAllister/London

If content is king in the new world of global media, the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber is no minor princeling. His The Phantom of the Opera has played in London's West End for 13 years and grossed an astounding $3.1 billion worldwide in ticket sales, to say nothing of CDs and sweatshirts. From his pen have also flowed Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar and Starlight Express. And Evita, with a little help from Madonna, grossed $146 million as a movie after racking up millions as a play. Like many an aristocrat before him, Lord Lloyd Webber (he was made a baron for life in 1997) has decided to add to his impressive digs in London. He and a partner paid slightly more than $150 million for the Stoll Moss group, adding its 10 topflight London theaters to his existing portfolio of three. The purchase makes Lloyd Webber Britain's most important impresario of commercial theater.

His empire building in the West End looks shrewd. While lots of shows flop, total box-office revenue there has climbed in 12 of the past 13 years, to $425 million in 1999, when more than 12 million tickets were bought at an average price of $35. That's a nightly equivalent of more than 425 double-decker busloads of theatergoers. William Jackson, managing director of NatWest Equity Partners, an equal investor in the 13 theaters with Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group, sees even better times ahead. "The demand for live entertainment is increasing," he says, "and there is also a trend toward convergence between filmed entertainment and theatrical entertainment."

That means profitable opportunities to turn plays--especially the kind of blockbuster musicals Lloyd Webber writes--into movies and also, as Disney's The Lion King demonstrates, to turn highly promoted films into money-spinning plays. Lloyd Webber's new real estate includes the London Palladium and the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, famous large venues ideal for launching plays with transatlantic appeal that could morph into movies or television. Nor is Lloyd Webber's empire building likely to stop here. He and his partners are looking to buy up other major theaters in Europe and the U.S. In a few years they hope to take their company public and really cash in.

Critics grumble that Lloyd Webber might homogenize the West End by filling it entirely with his type of catchy but bland popular musical or even with his own works, but he scoffs at those ideas as both impractical and commercially suicidal. The theaters will still present a wide mix of plays, he says, in keeping with his broad-ranging multimedia strategy. "With control of these high-quality drama houses, think about his ability to hammer out alliances with young playwrights who can produce good plays that also have film potential," says Stephen Bannon, managing director of the investment bank SG Cowen, who advised Stoll Moss's parent company in the buyout. And Lloyd Webber has the financial heft to produce plays himself in his new properties rather than simply rent the spaces to independent producers.

Overall British reaction to Lloyd Webber's coup has been very positive. "He has a real love for the theater, and that's what's needed," said Emma De Souza, spokeswoman for the Society of London Theatre, the trade association of commercial theaters. Britons also like the fact that Lloyd Webber beat out several U.S. bidders, including the live-entertainment company SFX, which snapped up 23 other theaters around Britain last year for $259 million. Lloyd Webber argued that the deal "has got enormous implications for keeping the theater in the hands that it should be kept in, and not in the hands of pen pushers and number crunchers."

Lloyd Webber has ambitious plans for his new venues. He thinks Indian music will be the next big rage, and he is in the early stages of organizing an Indian musical for the West End. He is already working on a musical with the comedian Ben Elton based on Northern Ireland's years of sectarian bloodshed. If almost anyone else tried peddling ideas based on those subjects, he or she would be laughed all the way to Liverpool--but this is, after all, Andrew Lloyd Webber. As Jackson puts it, he is "the most successful composer of all time, who appeals to a 66-year-old Japanese guy as well as a 12-year-old California girl." Owning London's most famous theaters may not make his talent surefire, but it certainly gives him a formidable launching pad for anything that sparks his lordly--and superprofitable--imagination.