Standing Room Only

Getting in to a new Broadway hit often takes patience, pleading--or a hefty premium that is many times the price of admission. Tickets disappear first at the box office, then at the large, reputable ticket brokers (who, unlike many of their smaller, shadier colleagues, charge no more than the top legal fee of 75-c- a ticket). But for those who want seats badly enough, especially in the first ten rows, there is a booming black market.

This season, theater lovers can look with some hope to a midtown Manhattan cubbyhole. There, amid the jangle of telephones, a stagestruck, 27-year-old girl rides herd on thousands of good tickets to the best shows in town. Plump, Brooklyn-born Sylvia Siegler works 14 hours a day on her new business--the Show-of-the-Month Club, which has caught on so fast that next week it moves into a whole floor of offices.

Sylvia, who also runs a talent agency and books theater parties in her spare time, charges $10 for ten months of club membership. For this, the member gets a chance to buy a pair of tickets, at the box-office price, to the club's monthly show selection, or an alternate. He also gets the club newspaper's breathless bulletins on forthcoming shows and, as an occasional "bonus," a chance to buy tickets at a discount to a preview.

What impresses oldtimers (and boosts membership, now 1,300, at a rate of 15 to 20 a day) is Sylvia's knack for picking winners before they reach Broadway. Among her selections: Edward, My Son; Life With Mother; Anne of the Thousand Days; Death of a Salesman; Kiss Me, Kate. For this month she has chosen Sidney Kingsley's promising Detective Story. She has also closed a deal giving her members seats for April's South Pacific, whose author-producers, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, are notoriously fussy about what happens to their tickets.

Sylvia is an annoyance to her more conventional fellow ticket brokers. Last week some of them planned an appeal to the League of New York Theaters to outlaw her club because, they argued, she was violating the ticket code's ban on large purchases of seats in advance of a show's opening. The same code also bans trafficking in tickets as if they were chocolate bars in Berlin--but no one seemed much concerned about that.

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