(The images below are thumbnails – click on them to see larger versions.)

Weber & Fields: Burlesque Musicals 
Joe Weber and Lew Fields as their alter egos "Mike & Meyer."

The most popular burlesque musicals of the 1890s were created by comedians Joe Weber and Lew Fields. Weber played the short, rotund "Mike," while Fields was the tall and lean "Meyer," a bully who constantly schemed to swindle Mike out of his money. With these cartoonish personas, Weber and Fields became vaudeville's definitive "Dutch" act (a corruption of "Deutsch" - i.e. "German"). By the 1880s, they were one of the top comedy acts in vaudeville.

There was nothing subtle about Weber & Fields. They used false chin beards, pork pie hats, and outrageous German accents. Their dialogue relied on silly misunderstandings and knockabout battles. Weber once said that "all the public wanted to see was Fields knock the hell out of me." The act usually began with Fields pushing the smaller Weber onstage, Weber indignantly squealing, "Don't pooosh me, Meyer, don't pooosh me!" Both characters spoke fractured English --

WEBER: I am delightfulness to meet you!
FIELDS: Der disgust is all mine!

In the course of their banter, one would unintentionally offend the other, with insults turning into all-out battles with punches, kicks, pratfalls, etc.

Beginning in 1896, Weber and Fields used their act as the basis for more than a dozen Broadway musicals that they jointly produced and starred in. In their earliest productions, the first half of the evening was a musical burlesque of a recent Broadway hit (Cyrano de Bergerac became Cyranose de Bric-a-Brac), and the intermission was followed by a collection of individual musical comedy acts.

The program for Weber and Fields' Whoop-Dee-Doo (1904). Although they would work together again, this run marked the end of their active partnership.

These Weber & Fields burlesques went so far as to spoof specific sets and costumes. These extended parodies were burlesques in the classic sense, with clean content designed to attract a family audience. The humor could aim in almost any direction. When skewering a drama set in Scotland, Weber & Fields included a song entitled "Alexander's Bagpipe Band" -- spoofing the Irving Berlin hit about a similarly named ragtime group.

Being spoofed by Weber and Fields proved to be such great publicity that producers campaigned for their shows to be targeted. The variety segments of these catch-all evenings did much to refine and define the revue as a Broadway-level entertainment.

Lillian Russell
Beloved soprano Lillian Russell enjoyed prolonged stardom in vaudeville as well as Broadway.

While Weber and Fields were the main stars of their joint productions, they had the good sense to surround themselves with several of the musical theater's biggest talents -- the most stellar company Broadway has ever seen. Fay Templeton, Anna Held, DeWolf Hopper and vaudeville favorite Marie Dressler were regulars, as was Lillian Russell, a singing actress whose name lives on as the epitome of 1890s glamour.

Russell was renowned for her piping high C, a curvaceous (if increasingly ample) figure, and a winning way with comic dialogue. She debuted at Tony Pastor's in 1883 and solidified her reputation in a series of Broadway operettas. Russell's talent, beauty and infamous relationship with financier "Diamond" Jim Brady made her a national celebrity. She eventually commanded a weekly salary of $1,250, a record figure for Broadway performers of the 1890s. After adding Russell to their team, Weber and Fields dropped their existing format and switched to full-length musical comedies. With preposterous titles like Whirl-i-gig (1899 - 264) and Fiddle-dee-dee (1899 - 262), these lighthearted hits followed their New York runs with lucrative national tours.

One Russell show -- and one song -- had a back story that became the stuff of theatrical legend. Composer John Stromberg had written several hit songs for Russell. During pre-production for Twirly Whirly (1902 - 244), he delayed delivery of her new solo, insisting it was not ready. Days before the first rehearsal, Stromberg took his own life, and the folded manuscript for a sentimental ballad entitled "Come Down Ma Evenin' Star" was found in his coat pocket. Claims that Russell burst into tears while singing it on opening night were probably a press agent's fantasy, but the public was hooked. "Come Down Ma Evenin' Star" became Russell's trademark number.

Faye Templeton, Lew Fields, Joe Weber and Lillian Russell in their final joint stage vehicle, Hokey Pokey (1912).

Although Weber & Fields ended their Broadway partnership in 1904, they reunited eight years later for Hokey Pokey (1912 - 108) with Russell making her final Broadway appearance to reprise "Come Down Ma Evenin' Star." She continued to sing in vaudeville until failing health forced her to retire in 1919. Both Weber and Fields remained active in show business through the 1930s, reviving their old act on several occasions. 

Imitators & Legacies
Weber-Fields had many imitators in vaudeville. Their Broadway burlesque-variety formula was copied by Gus and Max Rogers, who played characters painfully similar to "Mike & Meyer" in a series of eight Broadway musicals between 1899 and 1908. With pleasant but unmemorable scores, the Rogers Brothers musicals showcased such outstanding musical stage talents as Pat Rooney, Della Fox and (in her Broadway debut) vaudeville great Nora Bayes. Although audiences enjoyed the silliness, the Rogers' burlesques were no match for the best of Weber & Fields.

Lew Fields' most direct legacy was his children – librettists Herb and Joseph, and lyricist/librettist Dorothy, all of whom would contribute to some of the most important musicals of the 20th Century. But his partnership with Joe Weber left a theatrical legacy of its own. Their biographers put it this way -- 

How do we judge the legacy of Weber and Fields and their Music Hall? It was on the Music Hall stage that the basic forms and techniques of the revue and the musical were assembled and tried out . . .It was also on the music hall stage that Julian Mitchell defined the creative responsibilities of the stage director, becoming the progenitor of American musical directors, from Ned Wayburn to Bob Fosse. . . Socially and aesthetically, Weber & Fields Music Hall was the evolutionary link between the popular stage entertainments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- Armond Fields and L. Marc Fields, From the Bowery to Broadway: Lew Fields and the Roots of American Popular Theater (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 203.

While homegrown musical comedies entertained New York, a British team initiated a series of shows that caught the imagination of the entire English speaking world.