CONCERT TO SAVE THE BEACON - FELT FORUM - SEPT 27, 1986 - TICKET.

Benefit Concert For Beacon Theater Will the Beacon Theater, the 2,700-seat concert hall that is one of Manhattan's few surviving movie palaces, be converted into a nightclub-restaurant-discotheque? As a result of what a Beacon spokesman called ''fine print'' in the zoning laws, the matter is still not settled, and efforts for and against the conversion continue. On Saturday, an all-star ''Concert to Save the Beacon Theater'' will be held at the Felt Forum to benefit the community group opposed to the conversion.

The concert will offer a fine sampling of New York rock, pop, funk and jazz. The headliner will be the songwriter Joe Jackson, who sings pugnaciously satirical songs with a snappy pop-rock backup. Also on the bill are the funk group Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam with Full Force, the songwriter Yoko Ono, the rock guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, the saxophonist David Sanborn, the singer Nona Hendryx and the jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan.

If the Beacon remains closed, Manhattan will no longer have a mid-sized concert hall for pop and rock.

''The Beacon is the only thing in New York between the clubs and the monster venues,'' said Joe Jackson. ''And that makes it the place for the more interesting acts that are around. If you close it down, you really deprive the city of live music.''

According to Dan Meltzer, head of the Committee to Save the Beacon, the concert could raise up to $30,000 that would be used to hire ''more lawyers and consultants.'' Mr. Meltzer's committee collected 20,000 signatures, mostly from Upper West Siders and music-business figures, protesting the conversion planned by Olivier Coquelin and Babylon Ltd., which began a seven-year, $1 million-a-year lease on the Beacon in July. Mr. Coquelin, who created the discotheques Le Club, Cheetah and Hippopotamus, and the architect Charles Platt, who has served on the city's Landmarks Commission, had announced plans to turn the Beacon's orchestra into a dance floor and to put a three-tier restaurant on the mezzanine level.

The Landmarks Commission, which has jurisdiction because the Beacon's interior was declared a landmark in 1979, approved the plan. But it still has not issued a certificate of appropriateness because city zoning laws do not allow a ''dance hall'' to be built on the ground floor of any building within 50 feet of the curb. The Beacon's new tenants say the building will be primarily a nightclub-restaurant, with live entertainment from 9 P.M. to midnight and disco dancing from midnight to 4 A.M.; the Save-the-Beacon committee sees it as a dance hall, citing the new tenants' announced plans to install an elaborate laser-disk sound system and light sculptures.

At the moment, the Beacon is empty, with its orchestra seats (which came from the demolished Helen Hayes Theater) unbolted and stacked, awaiting the city's decisions. Dominican Senator In Merengue Concert Senators aren't normally known for their terpsichorean skills, but one former member of the Dominican Republic's Chamber of Deputies is renowned throughout Latin America for his singing and dancing. That legislator, who recently ended a four-year term as a deputy, is Johnny Ventura, the merengue singer who will be performing Sunday afternoon at the Felt Forum in a concert that will be transmitted live by satellite to 10 countries, including the Dominican Republic. The concert celebrates Mr. Ventura's 30th anniversary as a performer, and should reveal why the galloping merengue beat is becoming a major force in Latin music.