The incredible story about the “Old Black Rhum”
The Incredible Story of the Old Black Rhum
There are evenings when facts take a vacation and imagination runs the show. The Incredible Story of the Old Black Rhum is one of those evenings — a music-and-storytelling extravaganza that promises to stretch credulity just far enough to make your ribs hurt from laughing. Hosted by O’Really at the concert hall Alandica, this is the kind of event where improbable things don’t merely happen; they arrive with a brass band and a wink.
Picture a rum bottle that refuses to be ordinary. It’s named Old Black Rhum because “Old Black Rum” sounded too serious, and because it insists on being spelled with a flourish. It sits onstage under a single spotlight, wearing a tiny captain’s hat and telling tall tales of ocean crossings it never took, of storms it politely negotiated, of parrots that spoke French only at high tide. The bottle swears it once won a dance-off against a lighthouse and lost its cork to a jealous narwhal. Nobody can prove otherwise, and that’s the point.
O’Really is the kind of host who treats impossibility like a performance art. He strolls onstage with the confident air of a man who has personally taught gravity how to behave. Between songs he’ll coax confessions out of the audience, coaxing them into revealing the secret talents of their childhood bicycles, or the last thing their toasters overheard. He’s quick with an aside about the time he taught a gramophone to play chess — the gramophone achieved checkmate by dropping a record on the board — and he tells it with such conviction you almost believe he has evidence, tucked in his pocket next to a slightly embarrassed compass.
Music at Alandica that night is less accompaniment and more co-conspirator. Musicians weave themes that suggest swashbuckling, seafaring, and the kind of domestic magic that happens when your kettle tries to sing along. A clarinet might flirt with the piano over a melody that claims to be 200 years old but is actually invented while you’re clapping. Drums provide the heartbeat for stories about secret societies of retired buccaneers who now run knitting clubs. Every song seems to be telling the same fib in a prettier voice, and the crowd is delighted to be deceived.
The storytelling is unapologetically absurd. A narrator might explain how Old Black Rhum single-handedly negotiated a peace treaty between a flock of migratory geese and a stubborn flock of streetlights, or how the bottle taught an entire village to whistle in three-part harmony. There’s a recurring subplot about a map that always points to snacks; it’s more reliable than any GPS and decidedly less judgmental. Logic is invited but then politely shown the door so the punchlines can enter with the fanfare they deserve.
Alandica’s stage is the ideal place for such delightful nonsense. The hall’s acoustics are so good that even a politely whispered falsehood sounds eloquent. Seats fill with people who have come for the music and stayed for the stories, but mostly they’ve come to see whether O’Really will ever manage to balance a spoon on a trumpet — a challenge he accepts with the solemnity of a man performing a miracle for a very specific audience.
There’s also a warmness under the whimsy. The impossible anecdotes often land on human truths: how we make myth out of memory, how a small object can hold enormous meaning, how laughter helps us make sense of the
