Meyer Lutz, which opened at Christmas 1885. After this, in 1886, Hollingshead retired, and from then on the Guv'nor (as Edwardes came to be known) was in charge, with the assistance of the theatre's star player, Nellie Farren. The next show that Edwardes produced at the Gaiety was Dorothy (1886), a comic opera similar to the Gilbert and Sullivan operas that he had produced for Carte, but the Gaiety's audiences were used to burlesques, and so Edwardes sold the rights to Dorothy, which became a hit at another theatre. Following on the success of Little Jack Sheppard, Edwardes turned the Gaiety back to producing burlesques, but these were "new burlesques": full-length pieces with original music by Meyer Lutz, instead of scores compiled from popular tunes. These included Monte Cristo, Junior (1887), Miss Esmeralda (1887), Frankenstein, or The Vampire's Victim (1887), Faust up to Date (1888), Ruy Blas and the Blasé Roué (1889), Carmen up to Data (1890), Cinder Ellen up too Late (1891), and Don Juan (1892, with music by Meyer Lutz, book by Fred Leslie and lyrics by Adrian Ross). John D'Auban choreographed the Gaiety burlesques until 1891. These new burlesques were very successful and toured widely in Britain and abroad. However, Dorothy'''s runaway success (it became the longest-running piece in musical theatre history up to that time) showed Edwardes and other producers that topical, light comedies could be enormously successful. At the same time, the death of Fred Leslie and retirement of Nellie Farren by 1892 helped bring to an end the era of Gaiety burlesque. Edwardes produced shows at other theatres as well. For instance, in 1892, he took over the Prince of Wales Theatre. In addition, after Gilbert and Sullivan stopped working together exclusively in the 1890s, Edwardes produced Gilbert's His Excellency at the Lyric Theatre in 1894. He also became manager of the struggling Empire Theatre, London, and transformed it into a music hall before it became associated with several successful ballets under the composer-director Leopold Wenzel. Popularising musical comedy In the 1890s, Edwardes hit upon a new strategy for the Gaiety, which was a variation from the kinds of shows that he and Carte had produced and also had elements of the Gaiety burlesques and of music hall entertainments. The earliest of these shows, taking a cue from Dorothy, had a musical style similar to the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. Into this mix,