A cappella group Straight No Chaser performs at 7 p.m. Friday in Reynolds Performance Hall at the University of Central Arkansas, 201 Donaghey Ave., Conway.

The show marks the 25th anniversary of the University of Central Arkansas Public Appearances series. Tickets are $30-$50, $10 for children/ students. Call (501) 450-3265 or (866) 810-0012 or visit uca.edu/publicappearances.

“We are celebrating our 25th season by bringing back crowd favorite Straight No Chaser for a celebration concert,” says UCA Public Appearances Executive Director Amanda Horton.

Horton hasn’t been with the series for 25 years, but she takes pride in keeping it alive and growing.

The series offered 13 shows in its first year. The current 2024-25 series has 21, spread across five sub-series: Broadway, Pops, Night Out, Speaker and the Windgate Collection.

The latter includes three performances at the university’s new Windgate Center, where the primary performance spaces are a concert hall and a 200-seat-maximum black box theater. All the rest take place in the 1,200-seat Reynolds Performance Hall.

Horton says her biggest challenge is programming productions around the student and faculty schedules. “First priority is to the students,” she says. “It’s constantly a matter of trying to put a big puzzle together.”

This past summer, series staff festooned the walls of the green room (actually, Horton says, “it’s a gray room”), where acts wait before going onstage, with posters, many of them signed, of some of the bigger “acts” to perform at Reynolds. That list includes Wayne Newton, Ray Charles, Common, Amy Grant, Dionne Warwick, Ricky Skaggs, Bill Nigh the Science Guy, George Takei, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and, of course, Rita Moreno.

The lineup includes some of Horton’s personal favorites, including Newton, although his show was before her time.

“The best thing is being a superfan, and then presenting them,” she adds.

Tyson in particular she praised for being “so generous with his time,” including a lot of face-to-face contact with students. A question-and-answer session was supposed to last 30 minutes; “after an hour and a half, I had to step in and cut him off,” she recalls.

Comedians have been popular, especially since the pandemic — Brian Regan was last season’s biggest seller, Horton says — but the biggest attraction is always the touring Broadway productions. “Those are always what the audience really wants,” she explains. Some of the recent top draws: “Mama Mia!,” “Chicago” and the recent single sell-out performance of “Shrek: The Musical.”

Horton says she is also particularly proud of this season’s Pops series, which has included Indigo Girls, who recently had to cancel because of a family emergency, and she’s working to re-book them for next September, and, coming up, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s “Creole Christmas” show, Dec. 14, and Hot Club of Cowtown with Tyler Hilton (who played Elvis Presley in the 2005 Oscar-winning bio-pic “Walk the Line”) in a tribute to Sun Studios, March 1.

The Straight No Chaser program will split, more or less evenly, between pop hits and Christmas tunes.

“It is a privilege to get out on the road each fall,” says Straight No Chaser member Walter Chase in a news release. “Starting in October and through until New Year’s Eve, we tour across America sharing our love of the holiday season. For many families, we have become a holiday tradition and some return each year for over a decade. It’s an honor, and it is one that we don’t take for granted.”

The current members are Walter Chase, Jerome Collins, Seggie Isho, Michael Luginbill, Steve Morgan, Luke Bob Robinson, Jasper Smith, Tyler Trepp and Freedom Young. As with the UCA series, the group is marking its 25th anniversary.

The group sold out UCA shows in the fall of 2012, 2013 and 2014 — the last marking the Public Appearances series’ 15th anniversary — and returned in November 2019 to mark the series’ 20th.