Lloyd Webber bids for £142m musical archive

When the daughters of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein announced they were selling off their fathers’ musical archive, which includes the rights to many of their own musicals such as Oklahoma, Carousel and South Pacific, as well as works by Irving Berlin among others, we should have guessed who would want – and be wealthy enough to buy – such a prize. Step forward Andrew Lloyd Webber.

His lordship has emerged as the frontrunner in the bidding war to own the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organisation, the publishing rights company the composers set up after the war, not least because it represents Lloyd Webber's own musicals in America.

According to the London Evening Standard, the composer and impresario has been working on a bid with Andre Ptaszynski, chief executive of Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group, ever since news broke last month of the potential R&H sale in New York.

But it won't come cheap. Despite being valued at £73m, Mary Rodgers Guettel and Alice Hammerstein Mathias are said to be holding out for twice that amount for the archive, which includes the rights to such R & H classics as You'll Never Walk Alone and Some Enchanted Evening, and Irving Berlin's White Christmas. ·