March 17, 2005
ONLINE SHOPPER
Look Behind the Ticket Brokers' Curtain
By MICHELLE SLATALLA
The New York Times
EVEN in a town known for the high quality of its amateur theater, a performance like Ella's as the Wicked Witch stood out.
The high point for me, as her mother, occurred after the intermission at "The Wizard of Oz," when a green-faced version of Ella appeared in the balcony to point her wand at Dorothy below. My 13-year-old daughter delivered the line "I'll get you, my pretty!" with a raspy cackle that carried across the audience to wake her little sister in Row 11.
"Help, help," Clementine said, disoriented but recognizing the evil chortle that has plagued her on countless family car trips.
"It's O.K., we're at Ella's play," I whispered to Clem as another wild peal of laughter sliced through the theater like a harpoon.
Clem sat up in her folding chair as Ella, threatening the life of Toto, nearly lost her peaked black hat over the balcony. Then my 7-year-old summarized the situation succinctly: "She's a natural, Mommy."
Clearly we will have to see "Wicked" on Broadway next month, when we travel from Northern California to New York during the girls' spring break. Critics say the musical tells a story that turns the Wicked Witch of the West into a sympathetic character. Or, as my oldest daughter, Zoe, put it, "It could be healing for us as a family to understand Ella's motivation."
There's just one problem. "Wicked," like so many hot Broadway plays, is sold out for months. I became one of the last people in America to accept this sad truth last week when I visited
www.ticketmaster.com. Ticketmaster, the seller of 98 million tickets a year, informed me online that full-price orchestra seats cost $100 apiece.
Naïvely, I gulped at that amount (yes, I'm also one of the last people in America to believe that it could actually cost $500 to take a family of five to see a Broadway musical that got mixed reviews and no longer had its original stars).
But when I searched Ticketmaster's Web site for "Wicked" tickets on the April dates I'd be in town, I got even worse news. The site told me, "There were no tickets available that matched your request."
The same held for the theater box office. I visited gershwin-theater.com and clicked on an icon that promised "Great Seats," only to find myself transported to a land far more troubling than the road to Oz. As far into the future as December, the box office had nothing to offer but a referral to a ticket broker, ticketsnow.com, which sold tickets at premium prices, like $285 for a seat in the front mezzanine, Row C, on Dec. 4.
Let's see, $285 times five tickets equals $1,425. No. Not possible. I opened the desktop calculator on my computer. I double-checked the math. I considered lying down.
This was my introduction to the vast world of online ticket brokers, who buy tickets and resell them at sites like barrystickets.com, goodtimetickets.com and unlimitedtickets.com.
It's a world of supply and demand, where brokers hope ticket buyers will be willing to pay a hefty premium for hard-to-find tickets to popular events. If, for instance, I wanted to see Barry Manilow at the Las Vegas Hilton tomorrow night, last week at ticketsguaranteed.com I could have paid $978.50 for two tickets with a face value of $165.50 each (main floor, Section 1, Row Q). If I wanted to watch the Kentucky Derby on May 7 from the third-floor clubhouse at Churchill Downs, I could have obtained tickets (for $1,825 apiece) from totallytickets.net last week. If I wanted to bankrupt myself, I could take my entire family to the third-floor clubhouse.
My first question was obvious. "What's the difference between ticket brokers and scalpers?" I asked Gary Adler, general counsel to the National Association of Ticket Brokers.
"Our members are legitimate brokers who adhere to a code of ethics," Mr. Adler said. "Brokering is their primary business, and they have to have a permanent place of business with a published phone number, and to be a member they have to have the sponsorship of other people who are in the business. Every state has different rules and regulations about ticket selling, and, at last count, 10 states regulate the price you can charge. Our members adhere to states' laws."
Unlike the scalper who stands in front of a theater or a stadium to exchange a ticket for cash in the hours before an event, the 185 members of the National Association of Ticket Brokers are accountable, Mr. Adler said. They have pledged to adhere to a code of ethics that requires them, among other things, to sell only legitimate tickets, to post refund and cancellation policies and to "maintain good character and reputation in the community."
Buyers can search the association's site at natb.org to confirm that an online ticket seller is a member.
Some sites, like TicketsNow.com, act as clearinghouses for other brokers. "We're not the original source of the ticket," said Kenneth Dotson, chief marketing officer for TicketsNow.com. Someone bought it and is selling it again. In addition to selling the tickets from our site, we also have a database that networks to about 80 percent of the secondary tickets sold online. Ticket brokers from all over the country upload their tickets into the database."
Other sites, like stubhub.com and
www.ebay.com, act as marketplaces where buyers and sellers complete transactions directly. "It's a two-way street, where an individual can go list tickets for sale and also buy tickets," said Jeff Fluhr, chief executive of StubHub. "We have an open universe, where a season ticketholder might come in and list a couple of tickets below market price just to get rid of them."
My next questions were: where should I buy "Wicked" tickets, and how much should I pay? I determined that while I might in the end find the best price at eBay, I didn't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a purchase that wasn't guaranteed. Although eBay polices premium ticket sales to ensure that sellers follow state pricing laws, the site's buyer-beware stance scared me off.
So I focused instead on StubHub and TicketsNow.com, which guarantee the legitimacy of their transactions.
For "Wicked," prices for April performances seemed no higher or lower than prices for those in March, dashing my hope that I might get a bargain by waiting until the last minute.
At StubHub, orchestra seats for "Wicked" ranged from $199 for a seat described as "T, W, U, Z, DD, the most! Up to six available, center" to $353 for a seat also described as "T, W, U, Z, DD, the most! Up to six available, center." At TicketsNow.com, orchestra prices ranged from $215 (Row B, up to four tickets, can't buy an odd number) to $280 (Row B, can't buy an odd number).
This preliminary research sent me scurrying to the mezzanine - the rear mezzanine. As a family, we had weathered Broadway's rear before; Clem proved at "Oklahoma!" that she could fall asleep in the last row as easily as in the first. I bought five $140 tickets for Row H at TicketsNow.com. Face value was $250, total. I paid $779, including a service charge and two-day shipping costs.
The seating chart at the Gershwin Theater Web site revealed that we were in the second-to-last row. I took comfort not only in the thought that we might have better seats than as many as 51 of the 1,933 theatergoers, but also in the hope that one day, when Ella stars in the revival, she may comp us good house seats.
E-mail:
Slatalla@nytimes.com
