NEA Finally gets a new chairman!!!

I can't believe I almost missed this article in the NYT today.  The news is huge and also looking pretty good.  Obama is going to appoint Rocco Landesman to the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Arts.  Some bullet points:

1) He's a producer of five theaters on Broadway, with a lot of experience in the Theater world.

2) He's forthright and honest

3) He's daring - HE is the producer who took a chance on Angels in America and brought the play to Broadway. 

4) He has the support of BIG voices in the artistic community - Tony Kushner calls him a brave and perfect choice for the job, and Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, thinks that he'll rejuvenate the relationship between the arts and the administration

WOW.  I'll update with reactions from the artistic community after I've looked around.

UPDATE>>

Well, color me impressed.  The man clearly has an understanding of what not-for-profit theater and commercial theater have to contribute to the arts in America.  Via Slog, here are some selections from a longer excerpt of an essay he wrote in 2000 on the interaction between theater for theater's sake and theater for profit's sake:

...increasingly the template of success comes from the commercial arena, which is, in the end, not dedicated to the art so much as to the audience. The uber-model for this trend is ''the American Airlines Roundabout Theater,'' whose artistic director, Todd Haimes, saved a bankrupt institution by adapting contemporary, market-savvy, the-audience-is-king techniques of modern corporations. Provide a familiar product (a well-known play with a well-known star) in a congenial setting (singles nights, comfortable seating), add a powerful corporate sponsor, and you will have a subscription that is the envy of every theater in America....it can be reasonably argued that the forces of the marketplace through the years have been just as effective a censor as government edicts.

It is disappointing enough that those of us in the commercial theater have long ago abdicated any purchase on sustained artistic enterprise. The idiosyncratic giants of an earlier day have given way, by and large, to syndicates of producers and corporations. Big Broadway successes are more often the product of well-crafted nostalgia brilliantly marketed than of bold and intrepid producing (''Chicago'' and our own ''Smokey Joe's Cafe'' are recent examples)

And now, in the nonprofit theater, too, the forces of risk control are at work. The managing directors, with their good board relationships, audience development campaigns and marketing strategies, are asserting their clout as the pressures to ''succeed'' increase.

It's also REALLY REALLY REALLY worth reading the entire essay, here.

But apparently, when Landesman tried to get into the Chicago theater scene (which is dominated by non-profits) he found the competition a bit too tough to handle:

Back in 1994, Landesman's Jujamcyn Theaters operation joined forces with erstwhile Chicago producer Bob Perkins to acquire the Royal George Theatre across the street from Steppenwolf. As then-Readercolumnist Lewis Lazare reported, Landesman and Perkins envisioned the Royal George as "a busy venue for new work, commercial revivals, and the more challenging Broadway transfers."

But financial failures...eventually prompted Landesman to end the partnership. He found maintaining a commercial theater like the Royal George too daunting in a city dominated by the very constituency he'll be expected to represent at the NEA: nonprofits.