LORD LLOYD-WEBBER is poised to relinquish his crown as the king of landlords in the West End of London’s theatre district with the £12 million sale of four playhouses to Max Weitzenhoffer, an American producer of shows such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Mr Weitzenhoffer has entered exclusive negotiations with Lord Lloyd-Webber’s Really Useful Group (RUG) to buy the Apollo Shaftesbury, the Duchess, the Lyric and the Garrick theatres.

He is thought to have beaten rival bidders including Clear Channel Entertainment of the US and Britain’s Ambassador Theatre Group.

The sale will make Mr Weitzenhoffer, a Tony award-winning producer who already owns the Vaudeville Theatre in The Strand, one of the most powerful proprietors in the West End. One person familiar with the sale said: “It’s a done deal unless something completely unexpected happens.”

The auction was conducted by Patrick McKenna’s Ingenious Media, which has also been engaged by Lord Lloyd-Webber to review a possible sale of the composer’s entire business empire. Bids for RUG, which could fetch as much as £500 million, are expected to be sought over the next month.

Mr Weitzenhoffer is best known as the producer of shows on Broadway such as the Will Rogers Follies in a career stretching back to the mid- Seventies. Most recently in London he co-produced the plays Some Girls, starring David Schwimmer, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, starring Christian Slater.

But he is equally well known to the people of his home state of Oklahoma as the son of an oilman whose family has given away millions of dollars to charity, sport and education. In 2000 Mr Weitzenhoffer’s mother, Clara, bequeathed to Oklahoma University a collection of art worth more than $50 million, including works by Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh and Degas.

Mr Weitzenhoffer, 65, recently moved from New York back to Oklahoma with his wife, Ayako, and told the local newspaper that his best advice was: “A man is a man and a word is a word.

“I learnt this from a Dutch art dealer. No matter what you do in life, when you give your word, you keep it. People who have worked with me in the theatre know that if I say I’m going to do something, it’s a deal. I don’t need a contract. That’s held me in good stead.”

The four small playhouses that Mr Weitzenhoffer will take over were put up for sale by RUG and Bridgepoint Capital, a private equity group. The sale is the largest transaction in the West End since January 2000, when Lord Lloyd- Webber beat Mr Weitzenhoffer to buy the Stoll Moss Group from Australia’s Janet Holmes á Court for £87.5 million.

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