The growing line to get inside the main theater for Friday’s sold-out show of the New American Shakespeare Tavern’s “The Canterbury Tales” wasn’t moving, leaving the large group of theatergoers packed into the tiny upper lobby an unintentionally rapt audience.
Just beyond the large wooden front doors, Out of the Blue, one of Yale University’s many student a cappella groups, was clustered inches from the crowd for an on-the-spot, pre-show performance, beat-boxing and harmonizing its way through a set list of pop and indie-rock standards.
Although it wasn’t what patrons were expecting to see and hear walking in off Peachtree Street, by the time the perky 15-member group got to its rendition of the Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights,” nervous laughter and cheeky inside smirks between couples gave way to an undeniable abandon of toe-tapping and grinning applause.
The repertoire may have outgrown old-timey barbershop staples, but with names like the Decibelles, VoiceMale and Nothin’ but Treble, collegiate a cappella is to coolness what encyclopedic “Star Trek” knowledge is to an active dating life.
“You could look up the word uncool in the dictionary and you’d probably see a picture of an a cappella group,” said Ben Folds, who after judging NBC’s a cappella reality show “The Sing-Off” and releasing the CD “Ben Folds Presents: University A Cappella!” in April, has become something of a spokesman for the genre, as well as a defender of some of its sillier motifs.
The nerd factor is as organic a component to collegiate all-vocal singing as matching preppy uniforms and the repetition of nonsense syllables. But to be fair, so is talent. And like the crowd at the Shakespeare Tavern, reluctant audiences everywhere can’t help but like this music, and the moxie and heart of its performers.
Yale, being a breeding ground for collegiate all-vocal groups, is home to the oldest group, the Whiffenpoofs, who first sang their now-famous ode to Louis Linder, the owner of Mory’s Temple Bar in New Haven, Conn., in January 1909.
Two Yale groups who grew out of that tradition, Out of the Blue and the Society of Orpheus and Bacchus, usually shortened to the SOBs, are performing in Atlanta this week. They are both part of the time-honored Yale tradition of building a singing group through a fratlike rush process. Every year in September, prospective singers audition, attend performances, eat and drink with dozens of the campus’ singing groups until the festivities culminate in a literal rush for the best singers in a chaotic event called Tap Night.
“One of the reasons I wanted to go to Yale was that I knew music was so important there that it replaced Greek life,” said Stephanie Weinraub, 19, of Out of the Blue, who along with Harris Eppsteiner, 21, are two Atlantans of the group.
Perhaps Nick Lachey, the host of “The Sing-Off,” was overstating it on the show’s opening night when he proclaimed that a cappella was “sweeping the nation,” but there is evidence that its popularity is growing.
The Alliance Theatre’s Sing Your Soul a cappella competition opened recently, inviting all-vocal groups to submit video songs over YouTube that viewers will vote on.
The format is similar to “The Sing-Off,” which pitted eight a cappella groups against one another in a four-episode “American Idol”-style viewer-voted, celebrity-judged competition for a record deal and some cash. Folds was the one judge out of three who lent musical gravitas to the performances, often whipping out his notepad to dissect arrangements and sound.
Folds was inspired to take this subculture of college musicians seriously about two and a half years ago when a friend directed him to a YouTube clip of an a cappella band covering one of his songs. He discovered to his delight that he was something of a cult hero among the groups, who revere his canon. Oddly, almost every a cappella group in the country knows at least one Ben Folds song.
“I wasn’t used to the conventions of the format,” he said. “I thought it was really innovative and made my songs sound good. Actually, I thought a lot of these groups were making improvements on the songs.”
The subsequent album highlights 16 groups he selected from hundreds of entries (including one group from the University of Georgia).
Since the show and the album made a cappella relatively big news, Folds has been trying to get people to rethink their assumptions about it.
“I’m always happy to push things I think are creative and fairly underdog because I feel the music business and the music press has always had a bully contingency,” he said.
“So to see people who don’t care about being cool or being a celebrity but who just get together and sing because they enjoy singing is just really, really refreshing.”
Concert preview
Out of the Blue
6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 5. Gresham Chapel, Woodward Academy, 1662 Rugby Ave., College Park. $10; $5, students. 404-765-4000
Society of Orpheus and Bacchus
7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 7. Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta, 5342 Tilly Mill Road, Dunwoody. $13; $10, MJCCA members. 678-812-4002, www.atlantajcc.org .
Visit www.alliancetheatre.org for information or to vote in the Sing Your Soul competition and for details about the a cappella musical "Avenue X." Contest winners will perform before shows Jan. 22, 29 and Feb. 5.
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