On the night of 8 June, 2025, Natalie Venetia Belcon’s grandmother, Ivy, must have been smiling. It had been a full 21 years since the last time her granddaughter had even attended the Tony Awards, then as a cast member of the Tony-winning musical Avenue Q.
“I missed this place,” Belcon said with a radiant smile as she accepted the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for playing Cuban music legend Omara Portuondo in Buena Vista Social Club. “This is such an incredible honour to come back this way, and to portray this woman in this band.”
With her win, Belcon became just the third Trinidad & Tobago-born artist to take home a Tony, joining Geoffrey Holder and Heather Headley. “I think I deserve it for this one,” she said — recognition for a role where she had so meticulously, lovingly crafted each look, each gesture, each word, spoken or sung; and in a production echoing with the music and memories that had shaped her.
Born in Trinidad on 5 April, 1969, Belcon was raised in a home vibrating with music. Her father — of Venezuelan heritage — was a jazz trumpeter; her mother a singer and classical pianist who had studied at Juilliard.
The family emigrated to the South Bronx in New York when she was five. But she still has vivid memories of her Trini childhood — memories swiftly summoned by old, familiar smells; accents; even the sound of rain and thunder.
“Oh, the rainstorms,” Belcon said dreamily in a Zoom interview with Caribbean Beat last July. “I would go outside and shower in the rain. Or be hanging out in a tree. I would get in trouble for that because, you know, lightning and things,” she says with a laugh.
As she recalls her childhood — a little girl with a crush on David Rudder, and who was in awe of both Shirley Bassey and the Mighty Shadow (“I loved his voice, his performance style, all of it”, she says) — what emerges is the picture of a smart, sensitive, and funny free spirit with a strong sense of justice and tremendous creativity.
“I was so young, but I remember the woman whose house we lived in — she lived upstairs, we lived downstairs. There were chickens under the house that I thought were my friends… I freed them one day,” she recalls, laughing. “And I hated getting my hair combed. My father called me ‘Mopsy’. But I only ever wanted to [be] running down the dirt road — me, my hair, and my underwear!”
She was also surrounded by a procession of Trinidadian musical luminaries whose stature she would only come to truly appreciate well into her teens.
“Holly Betaudier was a very good family friend. He was always with us,” she remembers. “People like [calypsonians] Sparrow and Kitchener were coming to pick us up to go do a gig. My mum sang background for them and I wound up doing it for years. So we’re both on the back of a lot of their albums. My mum and Sparrow are still really good friends.”
It was only as she approached adulthood that she realised how many of these “uncles” were “pretty big deals”. She remembers doing background vocals with her mother at the annual Mother’s Day concert at Madison Square Garden that the Mighty Sparrow had headlined and helped popularise over decades; touring internationally with George Victory; and even performing at a party for the Princess of Morocco as a college freshman.
But as much as she had early aspirations — encouraged by her late grandmother, Ivy — of going into medicine, the arts kept calling.
“When we moved [to the US], it was her house — a typical three-family house, immigrant situation. She took care of us. I was always with my grandmother — except for the two years we didn’t speak because she wanted me to go to medical school and she thought I was gonna be a bum and never work.”
Belcon attended the Fiorello H LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts (aka “the Fame school”). Already having a strong foundation in both music and dance, she focussed on acting, later graduating with a BFA in musical theatre from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991.
And once Ivy saw Belcon able to make a living doing what she loved, her granddaughter had her blessing.
Both while studying and after graduation, Belcon faced some of the challenges familiar to so many Black and Brown performers. She was repeatedly told she was not right physically for certain roles, or needed to lose her accent altogether even to be considered.
Nevertheless, the work came. In 1992, while performing as Erzulie in the US National Tour of Once on This Island, she ended up doing auditions in Los Angeles — opening the door to a string of television and film roles.
Through 2008, she racked up guest appearances on hit US series, including The Cosby Show, Martin, Melrose Place, Living Single, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; plus recurring roles on Roc, Beverly Hills 90210, Diagnosis Murder, Spin City, Damages, and others.
Belcon became just the third Trinidad & Tobago-born artist to take home a Tony, joining Geoffrey Holder and Heather Headley
Fresh Prince was particularly memorable — not least because of the strong Caribbean connections among the cast. Tatiana Ali and Alfonso Ribeiro (whose girlfriend she had to play) were both of Trinidadian heritage, while Joseph Marcell was born in St Lucia. She also became close to James Avery; they performed together in a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
Wesley Snipes was another Hollywood heavyweight she strongly bonded with — “except he wasn’t, like, Wesley Snipes at the time”, she adds with a laugh. “I also believe I sang Della Reese into my life… We wound up doing a show together and shared a dressing room. She was one of the coolest people that ever existed. We became really close.”
But through all the opportunities that film and TV offered, theatre remained her first love — especially original work where she could shape the material from inception.
Her Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regional credits reflect that ethos. She originated the role of Gary Coleman in Avenue Q (2003); played Joanne in Rent (2001), Madame Morrible in the US National tour of Wicked, and Mrs Phelps in Matilda the Musical; featured in Off-Broadway premieres of The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin (2000), The Glorious Ones (2007), 10 Things to Do Before I Die (2009), and The Last Smoker in America (2012); plus Knoxville (2022, Florida), and Jackie Sibblies’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Fairview (2018, California).
None, however, would have as huge an impact on her life as Buena Vista Social Club. Developed by Kenyan-born Saheem Ali, it incorporates the acclaimed music from the 1997 Buena Vista Social Club album — full of Cuban songs and styles, performed by some of the country’s most revered musicians — and explores how it was made.
Belcon originated the role of Omara during the production’s 2023 world premiere Off-Broadway, continuing through its Broadway berth in February 2025. She had immediately resonated with its diverse, international team; its story of often overlooked Caribbean excellence; and the magnificent music she’d been introduced to by her parents — on an album recorded the same year her grandmother Ivy passed (1996).
“She wound up with lung cancer from second-hand smoke. I was living in LA, filming something — and she was hanging on until I could get there. She took her last breath as the plane landed. And for the next 10 years, the guilt I suffered… I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. So now, if I’m working and it involves family? They’ve got to wait, because I gotta go.”
Both Ivy and especially Belcon’s late father (who passed in 2017) continue to be strong presences for her, including on stage. Belcon describes it as “surreal” — standing outside of her body, thinking about moments with her family and the album.
Both Portuondo and Belcon’s own mother, now living with dementia, managed to make it to a performance. “My mother sits and looks at the Playbill all the time. She doesn’t remember seeing the show, but she’ll tell me everything about it. And she tells me all the time: she’s very proud of me.”
In addition to the Tony, Belcon picked up Drama Desk, Drama League, and Lucille Lortel award nominations (winning the Lortel) — the first such accolades in her long, storied career. She already has some ideas for new projects that she’s keeping close to her chest. But for now, there is her luminous performance as Omara, and a life swirling with music and memory.