Blog
Page: 111
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.”
Trending on Billboard
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.
Actors Natalie Venetia Belcon and Isa Antonetti on the red carpet as they arrive to the Buena Vista Social Club musical opening night on Broadway on March 19, 2025, in New York City.
Andy Henderson
One year after the release of Beyoncé’s Billboard 200-topping album Cowboy Carter, “Texas Hold ‘Em” banjo player Rhiannon Giddens is opening up about feeling conflicted over her contributions to the culture-shifting project.
In an interview with Rolling Stone published Sunday ahead of the release of her own album What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, Giddens shared that she has struggled with the pros and cons of appearing on such a high-profile album. On the one hand, plucking strings on the LP’s No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hit single “Texas Hold ‘Em” allowed her to feel embraced by the mainstream Black community for the first time, she says — but on the other, it also made her feel like her contributions were simply part of a “transaction.”
“There are so many of us struggling to maintain our humanity in this industry,” Giddens told the publication. “My biggest talent is collaboration. I’m really into sharing and being one of many, and I feel like that’s important, but you can’t be a superstar and do that. You just can’t!”
Trending on Billboard
“There are two examples I could pull out, in my entire 20-year career, where I feel like I had to make a compromise in order for a greater good,” she continued. “This was one of those times … And there were definitely benefits: I’ve heard from people saying more people are taking banjo classes and dancing to it because of [‘Texas Hold ‘Em’]. It also gave me an entrée into the Black community that I’ve never had, to be honest. Because of all the things I’ve been fighting for my whole life, it’s been difficult to be seen as a Black musician, especially since I’m mixed, all this sh–. But for the first time, I felt acceptance from the mainstream Black community, which made me weep.”
That said, Giddens said it was “really hard” to feel as though her talents were “treated as any other transaction in the music industry.” “Because I certainly didn’t do it for the money, I can tell you that,” she elaborated. “I did it for the mission. So, my idea of what the mission is and somebody else’s idea of what the mission is are not going to be the same thing. There’s a reason why I’m not a multi-millionaire. If you are a multi-millionaire, there are reasons why. No shade, whatever. It means you do things in a certain way.”
The folk musician went on to give an example of a mainstream artist whose mission she does resonate with: Kendrick Lamar, whom Giddens says uses his platform “in an intensely activist way.” “I don’t know how he does it, but he did it,” she said. “He’s unique. Most people aren’t like him. So I can’t expect everybody to be like him, and that’s fine.”
Released in March 2024, Cowboy Carter was one of the year’s most talked-about albums. Featuring collaborations with Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Miley Cyrus and Post Malone, the project sparked much discourse about the bounds of genre and whether Bey was “country enough” to make the pivot. The album was notably shut out by the Country Music Awards, receiving no nominations despite its success on the country charts (including the superstar becoming the first Black woman to ever top the Hot Country Songs chart). Cowboy Carter did, however, receive both best country album and album of the year at the 2025 Grammys.
At one point, Giddens herself even responded to the backlash Cowboy Carter faced from country music purists — whose dismissal of the album she said was “just racism” in an IMPACT x Nightline interview. “Nobody’s asking Lana Del Rey, ‘What right do you have to make a country record?’” Giddens said in March last year. “People don’t wanna say it’s because she’s Black. You know? But they use these … these coded terms, you know? And that’s problematic.”
Singer-songwriter Chappell Roan splashes into the country genre as “The Giver” bounds in at No. 1 on Billboard’s streaming-, airplay- and sales-based Hot Country Songs chart dated March 29.
Released March 13, the single totaled 22.3 million official U.S. streams, 2.2 million all-genre audience impressions and 6,000 sold March 14-20, according to Luminate.
The song by the Willard, Mo., native also opens atop Country Streaming Songs and Country Digital Song Sales, likewise in her first visit to each chart.
Trending on Billboard
Concurrently, “The Giver” roars onto the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 at No. 5. It’s Chappell Roan’s third top 10, following “Good Luck, Babe!,” which hit No. 4 last September, and “Pink Pony Club,” which reached No. 7 a week ago; it ranks at No. 9 on the latest list. “The Giver” marks her first top 10 (or even top 40) debut on the Hot 100.
“The Giver” was shipped to country radio by Universal Group Nashville’s MCA Records. Of the song’s airplay in the tracking week, 20% was from reporters to Billboard’s Country Airplay chart; it debuts at No. 33 on the Adult Pop Airplay tally and is bubbling under Pop Airplay and Country Airplay.
The Country Airplay panelists that played “The Giver” the most during the tracking week: KFDI Wichita, Kan. (45 times); KTTS Springfield, Mo. (44); WZZK Birmingham, Ala. (39); KBAY San Francisco (12); and KYGO Denver (11).
Meanwhile, Chappell Roan is just the third woman to debut a first Hot Country Songs entry at No. 1, after two that also initially established themselves with pop hits: Beyoncé, with “Texas Hold ‘Em” (2024), and Bebe Rexha, with “Meant To Be,” with Florida Georgia Line (2017). (The latter song went on to reign for a record 50 weeks.)
“I have such a special place in my heart for country music,” the Missouri native shared on Instagram March 4. “I grew up listening to it every morning and afternoon on my school bus and had it swirling around me at bonfires, grocery stores and karaoke bars … I am just here to twirl and do a little gay yodel for yall.”
Puma Hoops has teamed up with everyone’s favorite pizza-loving, skateboarding, crime-fighting team: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The collaboration gives LaMello Ball’s signature sneaker line, including the MB.01, MB.03 and MB.04 styles, a fun mix-and-match TMNT makeover.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
The pack takes inspiration from characters and designs from the original TMNT cartoon that debuted in 1987. The first release, the MB.01 “Baxter Stockman”, is a multi-colored iridescent sneaker inspired by the half-man, half-fly mad scientist. The second limited-edition drop embodies Donatello and Raphael (the smartest and toughest members of the turtle squad) in a unique mismatched MB.04 design, which represents the turtles through their distinct bandana colors. The following release puts Leonardo and Michelangelo at the forefront with a blue and orange colorway.
Trending on Billboard
The final and more recent drop is a hot pink and purple MB.03 model, dedicated to alien supervillain Krang. The MB.03 Lo Krang features PUMA Hoops’ signature technology, NITROFOAM, which is found throughout the midsole and offers superior responsiveness and comfort while remaining lightweight. For quick cuts and spot up jumpers, a full-coverage nonslip rubber compound provides enhanced durability and traction. And the shoe’s disruptive upper construction, made with breathable monomesh, provides a supportive yet ultra-lightweight feel.
Boasting the same innovation as the MB.01 and MB.03 models, the MB.04 Donatello & Raphael and MB.04 Leonardo & Michelangelo styles come complete with a 5D printed upper – a multi-layered design that engulfs the shoe like alien tentacles – and a custom TMNT graphic at the heel. Additional design cues are inspired by Melo’s signature phrases, “1 of 1” and “RARE” hidden throughout the shoe.
“It’s been great bringing these designs to life. Each sneaker really is 1 of 1,” LaMelo shares in a statement.
The PUMA Hoops x TMNT collaboration also includes an apparel collection, featuring t-shirts, shorts, a hoodie, track suits and more. Shop the collection on Puma’s site, as well as, below.
PUMA x LAMELO BALL x TMNT MB.03 Lo Krang
PUMA x LAMELO BALL x TMNT MB.04 Raphael and Donatello
PUMA x LAMELO BALL x TMNT MB.04 Leonardo & Michelangelo
PUMA x TMNT Basketball Tee
PUMA x TMNT Relaxed 7″ Shorts
PUMA x TMNT PUMATECH Pants
PUMA x TMNT PUMATECH Track Jacket
Lizzo is putting on her guitar strap to take on the role of the iconic original soul sister, Sister Rosetta Tharpe in Amazon MGM Studios‘ upcoming biopic Rosetta, according to Deadline. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Per the publication, the project is currently in development with producers Lizzo, […]
Nick Cannon is famous for numerous music, acting, comedy and hosting projects, but in recent years, he may have become best-known for being a dad — to not one, not two, but 12 kids and counting. The Masked Singer ringleader first became a parent during his former marriage to Mariah Carey, with whom he welcomed […]
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. A good speaker can make or break just about any party or gathering, and it can even set the mood when […]
HipHopWired Featured Video
CLOSE
Source: Emma McIntyre / Emma McIntyre
Madame Tussauds Orlando just dropped a new wax figure of Beyoncé, but it’s getting some serious mixed reviews.
Madame Tussauds Orlando unveils new Beyoncé wax figure. pic.twitter.com/4S7LmzRwva
— Pop Base (@PopBase) March 20, 2025
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
While some fans are all about it, saying the figure is on point, others aren’t feeling it, claiming it doesn’t really capture Queen B’s true vibe. The figure has her iconic style down, with a killer outfit and a fierce pose, but many are saying the face doesn’t quite match her real-life glow. Fans of the BeyHive are going hard in defense, though, showing love for their queen no matter what.
Meanwhile, Beyoncé’s been busy stacking up major moments. She recently graced the NFL’s Christmas Halftime show, and of course, she left the crowd hyped. The performance had everyone talking, and it was clear: the Bey Hive wanted more. Just when it seemed like the hype couldn’t get any bigger, Bey dropped the announcement of her upcoming tour. It kicks off April 28th in LA at Sofi Stadium, and you best believe fans are counting down the days. Whether people are feeling the wax figure or not, one thing’s for sure: Beyoncé is still the queen, and she’s got the whole world buzzing as she gets ready to hit the stage.
With her tour around the corner, it’s safe to say that 2025 is about to be all about Queen B. Check out some of the mixed reactions to Queen B’s wax figure below.
This is partner content. Carnival Cruise Line partnered with Billboard to create an unforgettable oasis at Billboard’s THE STAGE at SXSW. John Summit, DJ Nala and more brought on the vibes for an unforgettable final night! Keep watching to see what you missed out on! Tetris Kelly: This year, we brought the heat to Austin, […]
While much of the 30-plus track setlist of Tyler, The Creator‘s Chromakopia: The World Tour centers around the rapper’s 2024 album, one fan made it clear that they want to hear at least one song from a different Tyler album, both online and in-person. After Tyler made a stop at Orlando’s Kia Center on Saturday […]