Excerpted for EH- SOURCE

The soundtrack to Mamma Mia! jumps to #1 in its fifth week on The Billboard 200. This is the second time in less than 20 months that a movie musical based on a Broadway show has spawned a chart-topping soundtrack. The soundtrack to Dreamgirls was #1 for two weeks in January 2007. Before that, there was a decades-long gap in Broadway-to-Hollywood transfers that yielded #1 soundtracks-stretching all the way back to Grease in 1978.

In the 52-year history of Billboard’s weekly album chart, only four other chart-topping movie soundtracks were from musicals that originated on the stage. These are The Sound Of Music (1965), West Side Story (1962), South Pacific (1958), and The King And I (1956). (A shout-out to Rodgers & Hammerstein, who wrote three of these four shows.)

The comeback of the movie musical is one of the brightest (and most surprising) stories in entertainment in this decade. The trend kicked off in 2001 with the success of Baz Luhrmann’s original musical, Moulin Rouge. It gathered steam in 2002 with Chicago, which became the first musical to win the Oscar for Best Picture since Oliver! in 1968. Dreamgirls in late 2006 and Hairspray last summer kept the trend going. The soundtracks to all four of these movies reached the top three on the Billboard chart, though only Dreamgirls went all the way.

The Mamma Mia! soundtrack hits #1 the same week that the movie tops the $100 million mark at the domestic box office. Both milestones may boost the movie’s chances of landing Golden Globe nominations in the comedy/musical categories. The amiable but featherweight movie would not appear to have serious Oscar potential.

Mamma Mia! is the second movie soundtrack to hit #1 this year, following Juno. This is the first year in which two movie soundtracks have risen to #1 since 2002, when the Grammy-winning O Brother, Where Art Thou? and 8 Mile, paced by Eminem’s Oscar-winning “Lose Yourself,” both rang the bell. (8 Mile continued at #1 into 2003, when Bad Boys II also made it to the top.)

Though ABBA drew wide acclaim for making some of the best-produced, best-sounding records of their time, they never had a #1 album. (They never even had a top 10 album.) So it’s ironic that an album consisting of cover versions of ABBA songs sung by such actors as Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan has gone all the way. It would be as if the Beach Boys had never had a #1 album and then, three decades later, a soundtrack featuring Beach Boys covers reached the summit.

That may be why a lot of people are going right to the source and buying ABBA albums. The quartet’s 1993 compilation, Gold-Greatest Hits, holds at #1 on the Catalog Albums chart for the fourth straight week. The album sold 33,000 copies this week and would have ranked #11 on the big chart if older, catalog albums were eligible to compete there. This is the third catalog album so far this year that would have made the top 15 on the big chart if the rules allowed. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ Greatest Hits would have ranked #12 in February following the group’s half-time performance at the Super Bowl. Michael Jackson’s Thriller 25 would have placed at #2 for two weeks later that month.

The season’s other high-profile soundtrack, The Dark Knight, continues to flounder. The album drops from #45 to #75, even as the film remains #1 at the box-office for the fourth straight week. The movie has grossed $441.6 million in its first four weeks. The soundtrack has sold a paltry 63,000 copies in the same period. And it’s not just a function of album sales being soft: The Mamma Mia! soundtrack has sold more than eight times as many copies as The Dark Knight soundtrack, even though The Dark Knight has grossed more than four times as much at the domestic box-office as the ABBA tune-fest.

From the Billboard Top 10 List:

1. Various Artists, Mamma Mia! soundtrack, 131,000. This is the first album of 2008 to take five weeks to first reach #1. Nearly 15,000 copies were sold digitally, making this the #1 Digital Album for the second straight week. Two songs from the album are listed on Hot Digital Songs, topped by Meryl Streep’s “Mamma Mia” at #85.

Useless Information: Except for the long-running NOW That’s What I Call Music! series, the Mamma Mia! soundtrack is the first #1 album to carry an exclamation point since Shania Twain’s Up! in 2002. Hey, if you were #1, you’d use an exclamation point too.

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