An Afternoon at the ‘Opera’ for $27,500 : Auction: Phone lines are jammed as three pairs of tickets donated by Michael Crawford are sold during Channel 7’s ‘A.M. Los Angeles’ program. The six raise a total of $74,500 for charity.

Phantomania escalated to Phantofrenzy Wednesday when a sizzling $27,500 was bid on a pair of 10th-row orchestra seats for Sunday’s matinee performance of “The Phantom of the Opera.” It will be the last performance to feature Michael Crawford in the title role of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical at the Ahmanson Theatre.

Two other pairs of tickets to the same matinee drew bids of $26,000 and $21,000. The regular ticket price is $50.

Crawford, who originated the Phantom role in London in 1986 and won a Tony for it in 1988, had donated the three pairs to be auctioned for charity on KABC-TV Channel 7’s “A.M. Los Angeles,” after hearing that ticket brokers were getting up to $1,500 per ticket for his final week. The station plans to release the names of the bidders Friday.

The auction, which took place on Wednesday’s hour-long “A.M. Los Angeles,” was to have been limited to that hour, but producers and network executives decided early Wednesday to extend the bidding to 3 p.m., anticipating that phone lines might be jammed.

“We didn’t want viewers to feel cheated out of making those calls,” said Claudia Contreras, spokeswoman for the program. Operators were instructed to tell callers what the latest bids were as they recorded the new ones.

Proceeds from the highest bid will go to Para Los Ninos, a social service agency serving homeless and transient families in central and inner city Los Angeles. Proceeds from the runners up will go to Equity Fights AIDS.

Winners must deliver a certified check by noon today to collect their tickets, which will be presented to them by Crawford on Friday’s “A.M. Los Angeles.” In case of no shows, tickets will go to the next highest bona fide bidder.

As for Crawford’s reaction to such meganumbers, “How do you write down speechless?,” he said Wednesday. “There were tears in my eyes when I heard it. I thought bids would reach $5,000, tops. There will be a lot of lemonade drunk downtown tonight.

“When the entire company gave up its tickets for a week and a half to benefit Equity Fights AIDS, we raised $50,000. Today, with just three pairs of tickets, we’ve raised $74,500. What can I say? It’s fabulous, it’s just fabulous.”

Robert Guillaume, formerly of “Soap” and “Benson,” will replace Crawford as the Phantom beginning Tuesday.

Orchestra seats for the hit musical, which opened in Los Angeles in June of last year, are sold out through mid-December. But the announcement at the end of March that Crawford would be leaving the show April 29 unleashed an unprecedented stampede for tickets that resulted in a market for tickets at extraordinary prices.