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As she exits the stage door of “Buena Vista Social Club,” the Broadway actress Natalie Venetia Belcon can see it in their eyes. The waiting fans thrust Playbills and pens into the hands of her co-stars, but when Belcon comes down the line, she senses their shyness, their wariness.
“They’re afraid,” she said. “It’s so weird. I’m like, ‘You guys, I’m pretending!’”
Onstage, Belcon, 56, plays the middle-aged version of Omara Portuondo, the famed Cuban singer known as “the queen of feeling.” (Isa Antonetti portrays the teen version.) Belcon’s Omara is stately, imperious. “You’re not the kind of woman one forgets,” a bandmate in the show tells her. She can dismiss a person with a tilt of the head, a wave of the hand. The role has earned Belcon a Tony nomination, her first, for best performance by a featured actress in a musical.
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Belcon is, she insists, not Omara, but some of this same majesty was evident even over a casual afternoon snack of calamari and plantains at Cuba, a restaurant in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood. The waiter seemed honored to shake up a mojito for her. Belcon, dressed like some expensive, resplendent bird in a blue-and-yellow skirt and matching jewelry, looked regal as she sipped it.
Then she pointed to the stalk of sugar cane in the glass. “Oh, I love sugar cane!” she said delightedly. “I grew up chewing on it. Then you catch yourself in the mirror, like, ‘That doesn’t look sexy!’”
Belcon insists that in her downtime, offstage, away from journalists, she is an everyday sort of woman who prefers oversize T-shirts and yoga pants. She loves to put on her bunny slippers and watch the UFC.
