In America, Andrew Lloyd Webber is best known as the composer of “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Evita,” “Cats” and “Sunset Boulevard,” among many other popular musicals.
But in London, the Brit also has a reputation as a major West End theater owner. His LW Theatres counts six houses in its stable, including His Majesty’s Theatre, the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and the London Palladium.
Nada in New York, though.
But there’s one building on Broadway he’s had his eye on for years — the Mark Hellinger Theatre on West 51st Street.
Never heard of it? That’s because today the 1600-seat house where “My Fair Lady” and Lloyd Webber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” long ago premiered is the Times Square Church, an interdenominational place of “Wicked”-adjacent worship. And it’s one of the neighborhood’s most desirable pieces of real estate.
“It has the best stage on Broadway,” Lloyd Webber exclusively told The Post during a sit-down.
“It was the premier house, really, for musicals,” he added. “Everybody’s tried [to buy it].”
Including, through a deep-pocketed partner, Andrew Lloyd Webber.
“Funnily enough, a few years ago I had dinner with Steve Schwarzman, and I said, ‘If anybody could buy it, it would be Steve Schwarzman,’” Lloyd Webber said of the chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Group who Forbes estimates is worth $43 billion.
“I said ‘I bet you you can’t buy the Mark Hellinger, the old Times Square theater,’” the composer prodded.
“’Of course we can! Of course we can!,’” he recalls the confident Schwarzman insisting.
“I said, ‘Look, OK, you buy it. I’m in as a partner with you. Go and buy it.’”
Six months went by, and Lloyd Webber checked in with Schwarzman, whose wife Christine produced the Brit’s “Bad Cinderella” in 2023.
“I said to him, ‘How’s it going?’”
‘Oh, we’re negotiating’,” he remembers Schwarzman saying.
Persistent Lloyd Webber asked again this April.
“He came to have lunch with me,” the Tony winner recalled. “I said, ‘What’s it doing?’ He said, ‘It’s the one negotiation we’ve not been able to pull off.’”
To quote Mrs. Potts: Tale as old as time.
The Nederlander Organization first leased the building to the Times Square Church in 1989 — when the neighborhood was dirty and dangerous and the theater business was wobbly — for five years at $1 million a year.
In 1991, the church bought the Hellinger for $17 million. With a congregation of more than 8,000 who regularly fill the collection plate, it’s now worth several times that. The theater’s last show was Peter Allen’s musical “Legs Diamond,” which closed 37 years ago.
“It is the theater to have,” Philip J. Smith, the late former chairman of the Shubert Organization told noti.group’s Michael Riedel in 2010. “We chased it twice, but the church wouldn’t sell. If they ever do, you can put us at the head of the list.”
Other power players who’ve tried to snap up the old Hellinger include British producer Cameron Mackintosh and crooked Canadian showman Garth Drabinsky.
But everybody who’s gone up against God has given up.
“That pastor there,” Lloyd Webber said of senior pastor Tim Dilena. “He’s just got one organ, a little stage, him and a microphone, and he probably outgrosses everybody on Broadway!”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
