A Noel Coward Celebration — Steve Ross & Friends

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by Jack Quinn, Publisher 

If you’ve never been to Guild Hall, the first thing you discover is that the performance space sits literally in the rafters of the church. You climb a steep staircase, duck the exposed beams, and land in a warm, tightly packed room where heat rises quickly on a cold December night. It’s not glamorous, but it’s intimate—and it turned out to be the perfect setting for an evening of Noël Coward led by Steve Ross.

EAG Council member Leslie Middlebrook opened with a warm welcome and a clear reminder of the Guild’s mission: supporting performers in need—those in crisis, in transition, or simply in the long quiet middle between engagements. It grounded the night with purpose: artistry offered to sustain artistry.

From there, the program unfolded as the “progress of a relationship,” as Ross described it with his usual wit: beginning in yearning, settling into domestic hope, and then, with Coward’s classic dryness, arriving at the moment when the bride realizes things are not quite what she expected. “I don’t think that’s ever happened in life,” Ross joked, “but I just thought—afar, ladies and gentlemen.”

Ross then shared Coward’s story of composing “Someday I’ll Find You” at Goldenhurst—two whiskies, no inspiration, giving up for the night, turning off a forgotten light, and then somehow sitting down and playing the entire song straight through in G-flat, a key he’d never used. It was an irresistible setup for the first emotional still point of the night.

Shana Farr delivered “Someday I’ll Find You” with crystalline focus—poised, luminous, and deeply felt. Coward wrote the piece as something suspended between longing and dream logic, and Farr honored its delicacy. Her phrasing made the lyric feel like memory forming on the breath. It was one of those moments when the room holds completely still.

Then came one of the night’s unmistakable stars: ten-year-old Austin Hardy, Shana and Jeffrey Hardy’s son, stepping forward to recite a Coward poem entirely from memory. No affectation, no nerves—just bright eyes and total sincerity:

Any little fish can swim, any little bird can fly, any little dog or any little cat can do a bit of this and just a little bit of that. Any little horse can neigh and any little cow can move. But I can’t do anything at all but just love you.

It was disarming in its simplicity, leaving many murmured “awes” in the crowd. Coward would have adored the moment. What’s going to happen to the tots, indeed!

The next emotional high point came courtesy of Dorothy, listed charmingly as “Dolrothy” in the program, and introduced by Ross with one of his gently unfolding stories. She is one hundred years old, and in 1943—“Where were you in 1943? Nobody?”—she was downstairs being married in that very church. She had seen Coward perform Present Laughter close enough to feel the thrill of it, and Ross added his own childhood Coward anecdote about mishearing “sheet music” as “sheep music” while listening to Private Lives on the radio at age nine.

Ross also shared his memory of seeing Coward accept an honorary Tony Award, describing his entrance in a brown silk tuxedo and his perfectly dry line: “This is my first award, so please be kind.” With the room warmed and ready, he turned to Dorothy: “Would you mind doing a little bit of Noël Coward, darling?”

She stood—steady, bright-eyed—and launched into “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love,” tackling its quick internal rhymes and tongue-twisting vocabulary with precision performers half her age struggle to achieve. It was thrilling—a burst of pure theatrical magic in that warm, packed attic space.

As the evening continued, each performer brought their own chapter of theatrical history to Coward’s world. SuEllen Estey, with more than 100 productions to her name including My Fair Lady, Sweeney Todd, and Barnum, gave “Wife of an Acrobat” a lived-in emotional texture shaped by decades of storytelling craft. Jeffrey Hardy, with credits in New York, London, and Australia, brought polished ease to “Boy Actor” and “I’ll Remember Her,” performing with the unhurried assurance of someone who understands Coward’s refined humor. Leslie Middlebrook, performer, producer, filmmaker, and EAG Council member, offered bright, expressive readings of “A Room With a View” and “Zigeuner,” and later guided the room into the final “I’ll See You Again” with calm authority. And Walter Willison, Broadway veteran and Tony nominee, delivered warm, character-rich renditions of “Sail Away” and the wry “Most of Every Day.”

Ross tied the evening together with elegant, lightly worn expertise—mini-biographies, musical anecdotes, and the sense of community that seems to gather naturally around him. It was Coward not as nostalgia but as a living emotional vocabulary: sharp, tender, and still capable of surprising us.

The Episcopal Actors’ Guild, founded in 1923, continues to be one of New York’s steadfast lifelines for performers. This celebration—generously sponsored by Life Member Nancy Moore Simpson—embodied the Guild’s purpose with clarity and heart. Great artists performing to uplift other artists. A small, overheated room at the top of a church. A century of theatre folded into one night.

Coward would have approved.