Two Actors, One Soul: Meet the Omara Portuondos Shining on Broadway

One is a Broadway veteran; the other a debutante. Natalie Venetia Belcon and Isa Antonetti are the stars playing legendary singer Omara Portuondo at different stages of her life in BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB, the new Broadway musical about the Cuban artists who brought the acclaimed Grammy-winning album of 1997 to the world.

With Broadway credits including Matilda (Mrs. Phelps) and Rent (Joanne), Belcon is a Trinitarian-American actress and singer best known for originating the role of former child television star Gary Coleman in the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Avenue Q. She had already played the Cuban icon knows as “La Novia del Filin” (“The Bride of Feeling”) during the BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB off-Broadway run, receiving the 2024 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Lead Performer in a Musical and a nomination for a Drama Desk Award for the role.

Meanwhile, Antonetti is a “Latinx, indigenous, mixed race LGBTQIA+ actress and singer from the Greater Rochester, New York area,” as stated in the show’s playbill, and is currently completing her BFA in Musical Theatre at Carnegie Mellon University. With credits including Evita (NYCC), Macbeth (CMU), and A Chorus Line (OFC Creations), she recently made her film debut in Gift of Fear, and is excited to make her Broadway debut in BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB — “as it reflects her own experiences growing up performing with her father’s Latin band, Orquesta Antonetti.”

Buena Vista Social Club was formed in Cuba in 1996, as a project organized by World Circuit executive Nick Gold, produced by American guitarist Ry Cooder and directed by Juan de Marcos González, who named the group after a popular music venue in Havana in the 1940s. To showcase popular styles of the time, such as son, bolero, and danzón, they recruited a dozen veteran musicians, some of whom had been retired for years.

The group’s eponymous debut album was released in September 1997 and quickly became an international sensation. On the Billboard charts, it reached No. 1 on Tropical Albums, where it stayed at the top for 24 weeks and spent a total of 266 weeks on the chart. It also reached No. 1 on Top Latin Albums and World Albums, and spent 19 weeks on the Billboard 200. In 1998, it won the Grammy for Best Tropical Latin Album, and the Billboard Latin Music Award for Tropical/Salsa Album of the Year by a Group. The Buena Vista Social Club album was also voted into the National Recording Registry in 2022 and the Grammy Hall of Fame last year.

With a book by Marco Ramirez, the Saheem Ali-directed Broadway show is inspired by true events, and features a band of international musicians to narrate the legendary story of the artists who brought the original album to life, going back and forth between the mid-90s and the 1950s. The company also features Julio Monge as Compay Segundo, Mel Semé as Ibrahim Ferrer and Jainardo Batista Sterling as Rubén González — with Da’von Moody, Wesley Wray and Leonardo Reyna as their younger versions, respectively. Renesito Avich plays Eliades Ochoa, and Ashley De La Rosa a young Haydee. Also performing are Angélica Beliard, Carlos Falú, Hector Juan Maisonet, Ilda Mason, Marielys Molina, and Sophia Ramos, among others.

Last Tuesday afternoon (March 19), dressed to the nines for the musical’s official Broadway premiere, Belcon and Antonetti sat with Billboard Español to share their experience giving life to one of the most beloved singers of Cuba. (Hours later, Omara Portuondo herself, now 94, would pay the cast a visit at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater in New York City ahead of opening night. She was not available for press).

What did you know about Buena Vista Social Club before joining this musical?

Natalie Venetia Belcon: I have musicians for parents, and they introduced me to Buena Vista Social Club, the album. I was 26, 27, something like that.

Isa Antonetti: I also have musicians for parents, and they would play the music [with their band] or the music would play it in the background and I would never know what I was listening to, until my dad told me: “You should do some more research on this on this Cuban band that we love to play sometimes.” And I was like, “Okay.” So I heard [the song] “Chan Chan” and I heard a couple of their songs and I was just humming them all over the place. And then they kind of just stayed in my Spotify and I would listen to them once in a while.

In the musical, you speak in English but sing in perfect Spanish. Are you fluent? How did you achieve the accent?

Antonetti: I’m not fluent, but I do speak.

Belcon: My father’s side of the family is Spanish, [but] I don’t speak Spanish. When we moved up to this country, we moved to the South Bronx, which is, you know… [heavily Puerto Rican]. So I am used to hearing it. I just never had to speak it. But I treat languages like I would music — I go off of the sounds and the dialect coach, so I’m good like that, just repeating and recording and putting my earphones in and you know, listening to it all the time is how I learned, anyway.

Antonetti: I always think musicians have the ear. You could give me some sheet music and I could make my way around it, but I learned best by our dialect coach, you know, speaking it and sending us voice memos, making sure I’m pronouncing it the way that is authentic to this show.

Beyond the Spanish, how did you both prepare to play Omara at these two stages in her life?

Belcon: I’m lucky in the sense that the stuff that you see of her is of her older. And so I watched “Adiós” quite a few times and listened to the stuff a lot. I mean, I can’t even help it now, it’s just kind of, you know, on repeat, basically.

How about you, Isa? There’s not so much of Omara from that era.

Antonetti: It’s so funny because I was thinking about it and I remember in the rehearsal room when they had the pictures up, it’s just like one picture of Omara when she was younger. I would do some research, I would look to see if there’s some videos of her when she was younger with like her sister and with her quad. And so I would use that, and I would also talk to [Associate Music Director] David Oquendo and ask what is the essence of someone who’s 19 in Cuba? You know, and I would try and bring that to her as well.

What was the biggest challenge of portraying a vocalist known as “La Novia del Filin” [The Bride of Feeling]?

Belcon: Well, today, it’s going to be [hard] to not pass out when I meet her. I hope my understudy is ready, ’cause I might be in the ER with IV (Laughs). The challenge is, even though this is a fable, to make sure that we are still being respectful and not making up somebody entirely. And to have a semblance of who she is, to have it resemble her as much as possible.

Antonetti: Absolutely. I could just quote what she said. All of it!

But this is your Broadway debut so, for you, what was the biggest challenge?

Antonetti: Besides the genuine general things about Broadway being exhausting through the rehearsals and the previews — you know, that it’s challenging in its own way. I think for the show specifically, it’s keeping making sure the time period stays in your body when you step on stage. I’m playing someone in the 1950s, so that’s different than how I would play someone else. I think the challenging part is remembering when you step on stage that you are a different person and you’re being respectful and you’re bringing life to something. It’s challenging and rewarding and all of the above.

At some points during the musical, your characters meet, creating really emotional moments. Any favorites for you?

Belcon: I think it might be [Ibrahim Ferrer and Portuondo’s duet] “Silencio,” when the younger two are up top on the malecón (pier) and Ibrahim comes in and then I’m having all the memories of things. That and, not necessarily my favorite but I think in my head the most important, which is how it all starts when she — again, it’s a “Do I go left or right?” It’s a crossroads: “Do I make the album or not?” Then she chooses and it’s a butterfly effect; it kind of affects everything and everybody else.

Antonetti: I would say “Chan Chan” — it’s had different iterations since we started rehearsal and I’m so grateful that I get to be a part of that number even longer because it’s so emotionally devastating, but I love the moment and I only get to see it from behind the stage of the malecón. I get to see Natalie come in and Angélica [Beliard] do this beautiful dance move where she transfers the trauma into Natalie. Just remembering it, that moment, I’m telling you, I need like three hours to recoup.

Belcon: I need three drinks! (Laughs)

What did you both learn from Omara Portuondo in this process, as a person and as an artist?

Belcon: I mean, to say that she’s strong is an understatement. There needs to be a better word — maybe it needs to be “I am Omara,” right? You know, she’s been through a lot, just a lot, and came through it all and succeeded. More than succeeded. Just the time period, what was happening [in Cuba], and she not only survived that, she thrived regardless.

Antonetti: As a person, as an artist… She is more than just those words. Whenever I think of her, it’s like what you said, strong is an understatement. She is just this powerful being that can take my breath away.

After months of rehearsals, how does it feel to see the whole show finally come together on Broadway?

Belcon: I had a little bit of a heads-up cause I’ve done it once before [off-Broadway.] I think it is different in the bigger space, definitely, but that’s always a fantastic payoff moment. All the hard work and the not sleeping and all the rest of it, when you see everything fall into place, you know, those moments when you see the younger and the older [characters together], it’s always the payoff. They’re emotional moments. They are.

Antonetti: There are moments where I just have to hold myself back because I am an emotional person. And I was like, “This is a dream and it’s coming true and I have to be grounded in that or I’ll freak out.” It’s like what I told someone else outside: It has been exhausting, but it is worth every inch and ounce of that exhaustion. Absolutely.