So: last week I went to City Center to see their concert staging of the musical Titanic. I’d seen the original Broadway production over 25 years earlier, and I remember being struck this time around by the way that this new production seemed to emphasize a certain death-haunted quality of the play. To say that a musical depicting a tragedy that killed over a thousand people is death-haunted is, perhaps, a bit obvious, and yet.

What I’m less sure about is whether that death-haunted quality was there all along or whether I was just more attuned to it this time around, being older, wiser, and more prone to melancholy.

Things got more interesting when I found a copy of the Playbill from that late-90s production and saw who was in the cast. Namely, Allan Corduner – an actor who I met a little over 20 years later when we did an event together. Corduner, you see, had read several of his friend Brian Catling’s audiobooks, and when I interviewed Catling at Greenlight Bookstore in 2018, Corduner was there as well and joined in the conversation.

Both Catling and Corduner were fantastic conversational partners: knowledgeable, friendly, and capable of holding forth on countless subjects. I’ve been thinking about that event a lot since Catling’s death in 2022; something circular having to do with life and death and art. And now, that circle got a little bit bigger.