Twenty Years After Sharing a Stage With Styx, Cleveland’s Kaboom Collective Tells Its Own Story on Film

In 2006, a youth orchestra walked onto the stage at Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and stood shoulder to shoulder with one of the biggest arena rock bands in American history. Nobody had really done it before, at least not at that scale. Styx, a band whose catalog stretches back to the early 1970s and includes radio fixtures like “Come Sail Away,” “Renegade,” and “Blue Collar Man,” shared the night with student musicians performing full orchestral arrangements of the band’s songs. It was the kind of pairing that could have been a gimmick. Instead, it became a blueprint.

Two decades later, the people who lived through that night are getting their own movie. Twenty Years On, a feature documentary directed by Evan Haiman, will premiere on Saturday, June 6, 2026, at Heights Theater Studios in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. The film traces the long partnership between Kaboom Collective, a Cleveland nonprofit that mentors young musicians and creative professionals, and Styx. The two have continued to work together across twenty years, including a 2016 concert special called Sing for the Day. Both events provide much of the archival footage that anchors the new film.

The architect behind that first collaboration was Liza Grossman, Kaboom’s founder and conductor. Her premise was simple and, at the time, slightly heretical. Rock songs already have orchestral DNA buried in them. Why not let students perform them as written, with the band that wrote them standing right there. The first concert worked. It worked well enough that the rock-and-orchestra format has since been replicated by artists and ensembles around the world, often with bigger budgets and louder marketing, but rarely with the same student-centered mission that Kaboom built the original concept around.

“Every person in this film made a choice to show up, to trust the process, and to give everything they had to something bigger than themselves,” Grossman said in announcing the premiere. “That is what Kaboom has always been about, and Styx understood that from day one. Watching those young artists grow into doctors, educators, Broadway musicians, and studio artists over twenty years has been the greatest gift of my career.”

That trajectory is the spine of the documentary. The filmmakers tracked down musicians who were teenagers on the Blossom stage in 2006 and asked them what happened next. Some of them stayed in music and built careers as Broadway players, studio musicians, and educators. Others left music entirely. One former Kaboom performer now runs the neurological stroke department at a major hospital. The film argues, quietly, that the point was never to produce professional musicians. The point was the experience of being trusted with something difficult at a formative age, and the way that experience tends to follow people regardless of where they end up.

Styx, for their part, never treated the partnership as a one-off photo opportunity. Members of the band have returned to mentor, perform, and record with Kaboom students repeatedly over the years. Guitarist and vocalist Tommy Shaw described the experience of seeing the project come full circle on film.

“It is amazing to celebrate our relationship and performance with the Cleveland Youth Orchestra twenty years later and see the kids grown up,” Shaw said. “We can’t wait for you to see it.”

Twenty Years On also brings the story into the present. A current generation of Kaboom Studio Orchestra musicians is shown recording new orchestral arrangements of “Blue Collar Man” and “Build and Destroy” inside a working studio, picking up where the 2006 cohort left off. The recording sessions were captured at Heights Theater Studios, which is also where the premiere will take place. Many of the students featured in the film trained, rehearsed, and recorded on that same soundstage.

The documentary is produced by Charlie Brusco, Liza Grossman, Evan Haiman, and Joe Weagraff. Executive producers include Jean Harry, the Brenda Fuchs Family Foundation, and the Arthur E., Elsie G., and Betty M. Kranz Family Foundation. It follows Kaboom’s award-winning 2025 short Kaboom Collective: Beyond the Stage, and signals a broader shift for the organization, which is increasingly positioning itself as a producer of films and recordings in addition to a training program.

The premiere on June 6 will include a screening and a Q&A with the filmmakers and special guests.

For more info: https://www.20yearson.com/