Stage Entertainment

Stage Entertainment is an international operating live entertainment company, a subsidiary of Advance Publications. The company was founded in 1998 by Joop van den Ende in Amsterdam. The root of the company lays in The Netherlands in the 1970s when Joop van den Ende - until then an agent and television producer - started producing theater, in the first years he mostly produced plays and comedies. This changed at the end of the 1980s when he discovered that there was a demand for American musicals and his first try at this was with the musical Barnum in 1988. Several musicals followed, with titles as Sweet Charity and Cabaret. Owing to the success of these productions van den Ende doubled down on musicals, with a dedicated reservation line in 1990, an open-end theatre in The Hague called Circustheater in 1991 and his own musical Cyrano: The Musical in 1993. Van den Ende and John de Mol - until then the two biggest competitors - decided to merge their companies into Endemol in 1993, all live entertainment was folded into the Endemol Live Entertainment Division. The company went partially public in 1996 and due to the uncertain income of live entertainment part of the board of directors and shareholders were getting unhappy with the division and wanted to only focus on television productions to create a steady flow of revenue. Therefore, in 1998 van den Ende decided to buyout the entire Endemol Live Entertainment Division for ƒ 169,5 million and forming a new company called Stage Holding, which would be renamed Stage Entertainment in 2005. That same year construction started on a second open-end theater in Utrecht, which would open in 1999 called Beatrix Theater.