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Dear Colleagues,
The 2017-2018 theatre season is just about to get underway and from my perspective it promises to be the start of another strong year for Stage Entertainment. Marketing and publicity activities are in full gear across Europe, attracting audiences to our exciting new productions as well as reminding potential visitors of the terrific entertainment experiences our current shows can offer. While many of our colleagues took to the beaches in July and August to enjoy their summer holidays, Stage Entertainment casts, crews and creative teams were hard at work preparing for an impressive line up of promising new musicals. In September we will present our first five opening nights: Tanz der Vampire in Hamburg, Was getekend, Annie M.G. Schmidt, a new original musical, in the Netherlands, The Bodyguard in Madrid, Grease in Paris and The Bodyguard, again, in Stuttgart.
Many more premieres will follow until the spring of 2018, and I am optimistic for a number of reasons. An important one is that the entire season was carefully planned well in advance, which obviously gives us more control in a business environment that is notoriously unpredictable. We certainly take pride in being so well prepared; it’s a complex task involving multi-disciplinary input from across the organization. Thanks to everyone’s hard work, dedication and professionalism over the last two years, we have become better at planning our performances. This will lead to higher quality and avoidance of unnecessary high production and running costs. Still, we will continue to adapt and improve as the season progresses with innovative marketing programs and Operational Excellence initiatives.
We had already started growing our business when we added the Teatro Coliseum in Madrid to our portfolio of European theatres, and this spring we also signed a long-term programming agreement with the DeLaMar Theatre in Amsterdam. These additional stages will increase the total number of visitors and our turnover. We also enlarged our content portfolio with interesting new musicals such as David Bowie’s Lazarus directed by Ivo van Hove, which we will stage at the DeLaMar in Amsterdam. And our own production Fack ju Göhte in Munich.
Significant changes have been implemented over the past two years by all of you. Many difficult decisions had to be taken and ways of working had to be changed, but the results are clear to see. The company is already in much better shape: we are successful at what we do!
More good news is that many promising opportunities still lie ahead of us. To name a few:
- Having a vision about our programming much earlier and having different options per theatre creates more opportunities for quality improvement of our shows. Our customers will be more satisfied and we will be more efficient; we plan better.
- Continuing to build our marketing intelligence and learning how to best reach our customers will attract more visitors to our shows at lower cost per contact.
- Working as one company that integrates countries and production teams’ best practices will make us better and much faster at what we do.
- Seeing our theatres as great locations where, in addition to our wonderful shows, customers can also enjoy the many other experiences we offer such as events, food & beverage, art collections and merchandising.
We will also continue to look at the further expansion of our theatre network.
In closing, I would like to congratulate and thank everyone in the organization for a successful year in which so much progress has been made. You should all be proud! I am really pleased to be part of this company and I look forward to working together with you all to seize the many exciting opportunities and bring great musicals to our audiences around the globe.
Best wishes,
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