The 2018 Barbershop World Champions, After Hours, are coming to Rexburg this weekend only, to perform in Rexburg’s Barbershop Festival.
The annual festival started 26 years ago, and this year will have two concerts for viewers to enjoy. The After Hours Quartet performed for the festival in 2019, and the group is excited to come back to Rexburg.
“We like to have fun with each other on stage and we sing music that we all love,” said the quartet’s baritone, Bryan Ziegler. “It's a pretty good variety of barbershop, jazz and some musical theater that we sing. We also like to sing a lot about food. That's one thing we've noticed that we tend to sing songs about food a lot.”
The quartet will work with choir students from high schools all over the region, and coach them for their combined concert on Friday night.
On Saturday, the quartet will return for a community concert featuring other barbershop groups like Sound Check from Salt Lake City, and Luminescence from Idaho Falls.
“There’s going to be more than 300 students who we are going to be working with over the course of the weekend,” Ziegler said. “They're going to be working hard, and if for no other reason, come out to support those students because that's the future of music and that's the future of barbershop.”
The high school concert is Friday at Madison High School at 7 p.m., and the community concert is Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Romance Theater. Proceeds from the event go to help fund the high school choir experience and concert. You can find tickets at eastidmc.com/tix.
“That’s just one of the best feelings is when you sing something well and all the students in the audience just go nuts and that's one of the big reasons why we do this and why we travel so much and do all these shows is for that feeling, that connection,” Ziegler said.