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Andrew Lloyd Webber buys Stoll MossDateline: 12th January, 2001 Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group has bought the Stoll Moss chain of theatres for £87.5m, thus giving him control of thirteen West End theatres. He already had control of the Adelphi, the Palace and the New London: this deal brings him the Apollo, Cambridge, Duchess, Theatre Royal Drury Lane, Garrick, Gielgud, Her Majesty's, London Palladium, Lyric and Queen's. He will lose control of the Gielgud and Queen's when their leases run out in 2006. In a deal done in April of last year, Cameron Mackintosh bought the leases from the freeholders, the Christ's Hospital Foundation, for a reported £15m. Stoll Moss had apparently bid for the leases but lost to Mackintosh. They did claim at the time, however, that the Gielgud and the Queen's were their least profitable theatres. The Really Useful Group had joined with city financiers the NatWest Equity Partners in a reported 50/50 split to finance the deal. Initially the former owner Janet Holmes a Court, had valued the company at £100m and bids came in from all over the world, including SFX from the US, Cameron Mackintosh and Peter Holmes a Court (Janet's son), who is a New York theatre producer. Talk of a management buy-out seemed to fizzle out at a fairly early stage. Why I did it In a TV interview with David Frost, Lloyd Webber explained that he was keen to preserve London's tradition of theatre and did not want the Stoll Moss houses to fall into the hands of "the money men". "If you were a pen-pusher or a number-cruncher," he said, "and you were given a musical about furry animals dressed up as cats, to poems by T S Eliot and directed by the then director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, you would have perhaps said `I don't think I fancy that'. It's terribly important that for the interest of theatre we are willing to take on new ideas and try them out." These new ideas might fail, he admitted, but that is how theatre progresses. Wall-to-wall Lloyd Webber? He will not, he says, be interfering with the running of the theatres. If he has a new show and one of these theatres happens to fall vacant, then the new show might go there, but he has no intention of making them his private auditoria. The fact that he is involved in the running of the theatres would never be the criterion for putting his shows into them. "I would like," he went on, "to see any kind of work that is going to increase people's love of the theatre and that can be as wide-ranging as you like" It is less than twelve months since Lloyd Webber took back control of the Really Useful Group for a reported £46.5m, which he financed with a bank loan. Seagrams had formerly held 30% of the shares which had originally been bought by PolyGram, which was then in its turn taken over. A new company is to be set up - Really Useful Theatres - and Stoll Moss' CEO Richard Johnson and the rest of the management team will stay. Lloyd Webber was quick to say that there would be no mass redundancies or major changes, but he did indicate that the new group would be looking to buy more theatres, perhaps on Broadway. This is the second major theatre take-over in six months: in August US-based SFX Entertainment bought the Apollo Leisure Group for £158m. As well as two arenas in Sheffield and Cardiff, the Apollo Group owned 23 theatres nationwide, including the Apollo Hammersmith, the Apollo Victoria and the Lyceum in London, the Bristol Hippodrome, the Edinburgh Playhouse, the Old Fire Station and Apollo in Oxford, the Opera House, Palace and Apollo in Manchester, and the Liverpool Empire. The same group has since shown interest in running the Empire, Sunderland, under contract to the City Council.
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