Lafayette’s Peter Pan Foundation offers lessons in music, theater and youth empowerment

Leslie Noel Hansen was just 25 and flourishing amid the Bay Area’s music scene in 2006, teaching singing lessons, dreaming of Broadway and preparing to head to New York.

That all changed the day she learned that Steffen Ryge, one of the Lafayette teens Noel Hansen had taught, had died in a car accident. The Acalanes High senior had starred as Peter Pan in Noel Hansen’s original “Wish Upon a Star” musical, staged by local teens who donated the weekend’s proceeds, some $20,000, to Oakland’s UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital.