Adele Grabs Chart Throne Back From Lady Gaga While ‘Book Of Mormon’ Soars

Robbie Daw | June 15, 2011 11:29 am

Adele has cut short Lady Gaga’s stint at #1 on the Billboard Top 200 by returning to the peak position on the main album chart for a tenth non-consecutive week. Adele’s 21 sold another 114,000 copies while Gaga’s Born This Way moved 100,000 in its third week of release. But as Billboard notes, it’s the Broadway cast album for Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Robert Lopez’s multi-Tony winner The Book Of Mormon that truly deserves kudos this week. Though The Book Of Mormon debuted at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in New York only three months ago, it’s already gone on to win nine Tony Awards, five Drama Desk Awards, four Outer Critics Circle Awards and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Musical.

Additionally, the Ghostlight Records original cast recording climbs to #3 on the Top 200 after an Amazon MP3 store $1.99 sale helped bump last week’s total number of copies sold to 61,000. (The album had already fallen down all 200 positions and off the chart last week. If only Beyonce could pull the same feat on the Hot 100 with “Rule The World (Girls)”!)

Billboard chart guru Keith Caulfield notes that The Book Of Mormon now marks the highest charting Broadway cast album since 1969, when Hair spent 13 straight weeks at No. 1.

The cast recording has also racked up the largest sales week for any cast album in the Nielsen SoundScan era (since 1991), and trumps the Phantom of the Opera (Highlights), which posted the previous best sales week for a cast when it sold 54,000 copies over the Christmas week of 1992.

See that, kids — religion and the F word equal a $imply magic combination!

The Top 10 of Billboard’s Top 200 chart:

1. Adele, 21*10 weeks* 2. Lady Gaga, Born This Way 3. Broadway Cast, The Book Of Mormon 4. Tech N9ne, All 6’s And 7’s *new* 5. Ronnie Dunn, Ronnie Dunn *new* 6. All Time Low, Dirty Work *new* 7. Jason Aldean, My Kinda Party 8. Brad Paisley, This Is Country Music 9. Various, NOW 38 10. Death Cab For Cutie, Codes And Keys