Intentionally or not, Hoffman Estates-based ticket broker Barry Fox is helping to shed a little light on the shadowy business of ticket brokering. Brokers rarely discuss their trade, but last month Fox in essence decided to talk by filing suit against Time Out Entertainment Ltd., a Deerfield-based ticket-packaging concern that’s a relative newcomer to the business. Fox’s suit alleges that Time Out–headed by Charles Williams and Anders Nyberg, two former Chicago-based executives with the defunct Ticketron company–reneged on an agreement to sell him more than 1,200 choice seats to producer Cameron Mackintosh’s hit musical Miss Saigon at the Auditorium Theatre. Thus far Fox’s charges have raised more questions than they’ve answered, but that may change as his suit proceeds through the courts.
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According to theater industry sources, a common modus operandi for brokers is to obtain choice tickets by developing connections with theater box-office personnel. But Nyberg and Williams don’t seem to have tarried around any box office when they started Time Out Entertainment in the fall of 1991. According to Fox’s story, which has been substantially corroborated by Auditorium Theatre executive director Dulcie Gilmore, they went right to the top, making good use of a business relationship with Gilmore that they’d cemented during their Ticketron tenure. (The Auditorium was one of the last clients to leave the ailing Ticketron operation in the summer of 1991, and though others interviewed for this story were critical of Williams’s and Nyberg’s management of the Ticketron office here, Gilmore last week said she believed they had performed their duties as well as could be expected under difficult circumstances.) Nyberg and Williams cut a deal with Gilmore to gain access through the Auditorium’s ticket office to as many as 100 prime seats for each performance of Miss Saigon. The deal also called for the Auditorium to receive $3 for its restoration fund for each ticket Time Out purchased.
But Barry Fox, a veteran of the ticket brokering business, finds Time Out’s so-called “package” laughable. “A rose is a rose is a rose,” maintains Fox, “and what you are really selling in this kind of deal is the theater ticket.” When Fox heard about the arrangement between Time Out and the Auditorium, he saw it as a potential gold mine and he wanted in. Last February, his suit alleges, he sat down with Nyberg and Williams and struck a deal to buy 1,230 Miss Saigon tickets (and a few others) at $100 each. For Nyberg and Williams such a deal would represent an immediate profit of at least $45,000 over the face value of the tickets.
