‘Phantom’ Tickets Draw Top Prices

Wanted: Buyers for “Phantom of the Opera” tickets.

“I can’t tell you how I got the tickets,” said Joan Yeoman of Los Angeles, who was one of 33 people who put ads in The Times’ Sunday edition trying to sell “Phantom” tickets, “but I’ll take the best offer.” She, like the many others, hiked her asking price to $500 a ticket for the hit musical, which opened Wednesday at the Music Center, but were slowly dropping the price just to sell them.

“I didn’t buy them to pitch them, I bought them as gifts,” said Yeoman, who didn’t have to wait in line for her six tickets (face value $50 each). Her boyfriend knew someone in the business. “But two of the relatives can’t go so I decided to give it a shot. . . . Seeing the show will be great, but selling them will be even greater, I’m money hungry.”

Joe Miller, a salesman at Front Row Center Ticket Service, said tickets to “Phantom” are very hard to get. His firm was selling tickets in the first three rows for $200. “I’d say . . . it’s the biggest that I can remember. ‘Evita’ was big, ‘42nd Street.’ ‘Les Miz,’ $100 for the first seven or eight rows. ‘Phantom’ is a much broader demand and broader audience, almost a pop event.”

But most Los Angeles ticket brokers said that while the musical is certainly one of the most popular events to hit the city, they are not so scarce that one needs to pay more than $200 per ticket.

“The ‘Phantom’ is doing very well, but it’s not a matter of being the biggest thing to hit town,” said a spokeswoman for Equity Theatre Ticket Service. “I can get a ticket for you for tonight, right now, no problem.”

Her asking price was $200 for orchestra. She said people who think they have to pay outrageous prices are under the wrong impression: “I saw a ticket in the classified for $5,000, but if you called that guy right now, I’m sure he still has the ticket. It’s not that big of a play.”

Mark Wagman of Dynamite Tickets in Los Angeles said there seems to be a greater demand for tickets for the Laker basketball finals than for “Phantom” tickets: “We’ve been swamped all morning,” he said Tuesday, when the tickets for the basketball finals first went on sale. “This makes the ‘Phantom’ look like nothing.”

A spokeswoman at Good Time Tickets in Los Angeles said people who are advertising “Phantom” tickets for more than $200 are “crazy,” and those who are actually buying them are “totally insane.”

“The tickets are scarce for the month of June and July,” she said, “but they are not impossible to get. . . . To try to sell a ticket for such a high price, that’s really gouging. I would be really curious to see if anyone is really buying them for those prices.”

Many private-enterprise ticket sellers did not want to give their names, but after calling several the highest asking price turned out to be $750 each for orchestra seats during a June 2 performance.

One seller who managed to unload his tickets said: “I paid $350 for each ticket and I barely broke even.” His seats, for which he was asking $500, were second row, center. He added that he will be out of town on the performance date. “Believe me, I was more than happy just to get rid of them.”

A spokeswoman for the “Phantom” said although orchestra seats are sold out for the show through next week, there are plenty of seats available through the end of November. The tickets, she said, are $50-$32.50. The play, which set a record $15.3 million in advance sales, is expected to run two years in Los Angeles.

“We in no way condone scalpers,” she said, “but we cannot stop someone from buying tickets and turning around and selling them.”