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A few years ago, the French Moroccan artist Yto Barrada visited MoMA PS1, in Queens, following an invitation to create a site-specific work for the museum’s courtyard. As soon as she entered the space, she noticed its walls. Tall and made of concrete, they reminded her of the old city ramparts and Brutalist architecture in Tangier, where she grew up and still spends part of each year.

“When I’m thinking of walls, I’m also thinking of symbolic walls, power structures,” Barrada tells me over video chat from her Brooklyn studio. Creating an outdoor, large-scale sculpture was a first for Barrada, but responding to power structures has been at the core of her cross-disciplinary practice for more than two decades.

As she worked on her installation—an arrangement of massive, brightly colored concrete blocks called “Le Grand Soir”—Barrada pulled from other influences that often show up in her work: labor, play, cultural histories. Such themes also appear in a concurrent solo show of Barrada’s photo-based work at the International Center of Photography, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Though disparate in scale and material and coincidental in timing, as a pair, MoMA PS1’s “Le Grand Soir” and ICP’s “Part-Time Abstractionist” speak to the many ways Barrada explores the social forces that shape our world.

Now, I know what happens at the Tony Awards. I’ve watched them closely for years, sometimes with friends and themed snacks (I’m looking at you, 2022’s “A Strange Fruit Loop”), sometimes at a more formal viewing party. At regular intervals I’ll also revisit “Bigger,” Neil Patrick Harris’s joyous opening number at the 2013 ceremony, knowing I will feel the same swelling in my heart every time he arrives at the climax of his rap: “We were that kid.” (Is someone cutting onions in here?) Still, nothing could quite prepare me for being in the room where it happens (…sorry!) during the 77th Annual Tony Awards on Sunday night.

Below, I’ve rounded up four things you likely didn’t catch watching the Tonys from home. We’re live in five…four…three…can I get applause, please?

The pre-show (which is actually very charming)

Yes, you can watch the pre-show at home via Pluto TV, but most people only know to switch on the Tonys for the CBS broadcast at 8 p.m. Hosted by Julianne Hough and Utkarsh Ambudkar, however, “The Tony Awards: Act One” was a delight, representing a welcome transition from the frenzy of the red carpet to the live show—and giving well-deserved recognition to the creative and design teams behind each production. Directors George C. Wolfe and Jack O’Brien also received their Special Tony Awards for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre during that time, giving two very endearing speeches. “Most of the people here tonight were discouraged by their parents, teachers, lovers, financial advisors,” O’Brien joked (but not really) of beginning a career in the theater. “But we couldn’t help it, could we?” The crowd loved this.

The weirdness of the commercial breaks

One recent sweltering summer afternoon, photographer Ethan James Green and I escaped the heat by visiting the Ukrainian Museum in New York to see “Peter Hujar: Rialto.” In the dog days of a New York City summer, when the temperature feels like it’s rising at the kind of frenzied pace you only wish your bank balance could match, the museum is quite the refuge from those steamy streets. (It still can be: “Peter Hujar: Rialto” runs until the beginning of September.)

Of course, the real reason to visit is to see Hujar’s incredible work. One could lavish all sorts of superlatives on the Ukrainian-American photographer, who passed away in 1987, and he would be worthy of all of them. Hujar, a titan of photographic practice, could be unvarnished and direct, but also possessed a very tender way of capturing whoever and whatever was in front of him—a singular marriage of tender intimacy and an unflinching look at humanity.

Hujar is best known for his work depicting LGBTQIA+ icons and iconography, from Candy Darling on Her Death Bed, 1973 to Christopher Street Pier #2 (Crossed Legs), 1976. “I love his work, and think that when it comes to gay and queer photographers, he’s one of the best,” Green told me. “When he was coming up, so was Robert Mapplethorpe—and it was like Mapplethorpe was so much about being abstract with his subjects, whereas Hujar is about getting the person in a very raw way. I prefer that approach—especially in portraiture.”

Yet the brilliance of “Peter Hujar: Rialto” is that it reveals work of Hujar’s that is much less familiar. What’s on view here spans a period from 1955 to 1969—just over a decade of images, but one in which Hujar captured the world slowly starting to shift on its axis towards what seemed like a more progressive era. That’s true whether he was in rural America or in the spooky Capuchin catacombs of Palermo, with city kids on the streets, or meeting some of the future icons who would go on to ignite the 1970s—Iggy Pop, Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis, and Loulou de la Falaise, who worked with Yves Saint Laurent, et al.

“I’m seeing a lot of images I haven’t seen before,” Green said that afternoon. “You tend to forget that he’s a photographer who was shooting for a good amount of time, and there was just so much work. You realize when someone passes that certain images stay and others maybe slip away—and that has nothing to do with how good they are.”

Walter Hill’s 1979 film The Warriors, based on the 1965 novel by Sol Yurick, presents a blood-stained map of a New York City ruled by highly territorial gangs.

Warriors, a new concept album based on the same story, begins with a dancehall-tinged intro by the Jamaican singer Shenseea, before Bronx-born rapper Chris Rivers hops on the track to rep and introduce his borough. This sets the stage for the next four voices: Nas (of Queens), Cam’ron (Manhattan), Ghostface Killah and RZA (Staten Island), and Busta Rhymes (Brooklyn).

Soon after comes a jolting reminder that this is, in fact, a musical theater piece by Lin-Manuel Miranda, as a handful of Broadway favorites (Phillipa Soo, Amber Gray, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Aneesa Folds, Kenita Miller, Sasha Hutchings, Gizel Jiménez, and Julia Harriman) drop in, playing the gender-swapped titular gang.

But then, the ultimate blow to expectations: Lauryn Hill emerging as Cyrus, a soon-to-be-slain gang leader who proposes the clans drop their rivalries and take the city from the police, which they outnumber 3-1. While Miranda’s Hamilton Mixtape, released after the success of that 2015 musical, featured several hip-hop notables, never has his music sounded so, well, hard.