cast albums
Hamilton: An American Musical this week becomes the first original cast album to log 500 weeks on the Billboard 200. The album debuted at No. 12 on the chart dated Oct. 17, 2015, which was the highest debut for a cast album in more than 50 years. It peaked at No. 2 in July 2020, which was the highest ranking for a cast album since Hair topped the chart for 13 weeks in 1969.
Hamilton logs its 500th week on the chart just one month after the album was elected to the National Recording Registry in its first year of eligibility.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the book, music and lyrics for Hamilton, has been showered with honors for his masterwork. He won two Tonys (best original musical score and best book of a musical), a Grammy (best musical theatre album) and the Pulitzer Prize for literature. The show’s creative team (Miranda, Thomas Kail, Alex Lacamoire and Andy Blankenbuehler) was even honored at the Kennedy Center Honors.
Miranda also won a Primetime Emmy (outstanding variety special, pre-recorded) in 2021 as a producer of a Disney TV adaptation.
To mark Hamilton’s 500-week chart achievement, we have prepared this list of the 10 cast albums with the most weeks on the Billboard 200 (which dates to March 1956). Hamilton is one of just two shows on the list where a solitary songwriter wrote both music and lyrics for the show. The other: The Music Man, written by Meredith Willson.
Alan Jay Lerner & Frederick Loewe are the only songwriter(s) with two albums in the top 10 – My Fair Lady and Camelot. Lady gave us such standards as “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” Camelot spawned “If Ever I Would Leave You” and “How to Handle a Woman.” Both shows had the same female lead – the incomparable Julie Andrews.
Here are the 10 cast albums with the most weeks on the Billboard 200.
Because of how the Billboard 200 chart is now compiled, where streaming activity is blended with album sales and track sales, albums tend to spend a longer time on the list thanks to continued streaming activity. The chart began utilizing streaming information in its methodology in December 2014. Previous to that, the chart was based solely on traditional album sales.
Also, a lengthy tracklist with multiple popular songs can help accrue large streaming totals, so albums like Hamilton (with 46 tracks) benefit from the continued weekly streams of their long tracklists.
Further, older albums (known as catalog albums; generally defined today as titles at least 18 months old), were mostly restricted from charting on the Billboard 200 from May 25, 1991-Nov. 28, 2009. Since then, catalog and current (new/recently released) albums chart together on the Billboard 200. As a result, older albums now regularly spend hundreds of weeks on the chart.
Man of La Mancha, 167
The Broadway cast album from Hamilton: An American Musical was inducted into the National Recording Registry this year. It’s the 15th Broadway cast album to receive this honor, and the first from a show that premiered after 1979.
Of the 15 cast albums in the National Recording Registry, four were released in the 1940s and four more in the 1950s, decades that are often thought of as the heyday of Broadway cast albums. That number dropped to just two in the 1960s and two more in the ’70s. And no cast albums at all from the ’80s, ’90s or ’00s have made it yet.
This makes Hamilton‘s achievement all the more impressive. The show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, is going against the tide here. Miranda is also going against the current political tide. Hamilton was scheduled to return to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for the third time in March and April of 2026. The show’s producers canceled the run due to President Trump’s recent takeover of the performing arts institution. “Given the recent actions, our show simply cannot, in good conscience, participate and be a part of this new culture that is being imposed on the Kennedy Center,” lead producer Jeffrey Seller said in a statement shared to the official Hamilton X page.
In 2018, the Kennedy Center Honors broke format to recognize the creators of Hamilton – Miranda, Thomas Kail, Andy Blankenbuehler and Alex Lacamoire. Historically, the Kennedy Center Honors have recognized artists near the end of their careers. Here, they gave an award to talents mid-career to honor a specific achievement. (The National Recording Registry is administered by the Library of Congress, not the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.)
Miranda wrote both music and lyrics for the songs in Hamilton. The songs in five other cast albums in the National Recording Registry were the work of a solitary songwriter. Stephen Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics to all the songs in Sweeney Todd, as did Charlie Smalls (The Wiz), Frank Loesser (Guys and Dolls), Cole Porter (Kiss Me, Kate) and Marc Blitzstein (The Cradle Will Rock).
Sondheim and his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, both wrote songs for three of the 15 cast albums in the Registry. Sondheim wrote the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy before serving in both capacities on Sweeney Todd. Hammerstein collaborated with Jerome Kern on Show Boat before teaming with Richard Rodgers for Oklahoma! and South Pacific.
If you’re wondering why The Sound of Music (also by Rodgers & Hammerstein) isn’t listed here, that’s easy to explain. The 1965 film soundtrack with Julie Andrews is in the Registry, but the 1959 Broadway cast album with Mary Martin is not. At least not yet. We’ll update this list as more Broadway cast albums are saluted.
Here are all the Broadway cast albums that have been inducted into the National Recording Registry. They are listed in chronological order by show date. We show Billboard 200 peaks for albums that were released since that chart originated in March 1956.
Show Boat (1932)
The new SUNSET BLVD: The Album musical cast recording, led by Nicole Scherzinger, debuts at No. 1 on Billboard’s Cast Albums chart dated Nov. 9. The Cast Albums chart ranks the top-selling cast recordings of the week in the United States, based on traditional album sales, according to data tracking firm Luminate. The Nov. 9-dated […]
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