One of Burnand's biggest successes, both in "Punch" and on stage, was satire of the aesthetic movement. His play "The Colonel" (1881), based on "The Serious Family", a play by Morris Barnett, ran for 550 performances and toured extensively. It made so much money for the actor-manager Edgar Bruce that he was able to build the Prince of Wales Theatre. Burnand rushed "The Colonel" into production to make sure that it opened several months before Gilbert and Sullivan's similarly themed comic opera, "Patience", but "Patience" ran even longer than "The Colonel". Oscar Wilde, no fan of Burnand's farces, wrote, in anticipation of seeing "Patience": "With Gilbert and Sullivan I am sure we will have something better than the dull farce of "The Colonel"". For the Gaiety Theatre, Burnand wrote a burlesque of "The Tempest" entitled "Ariel" in October 1883, with music by Meyer Lutz, starring Nellie Farren and Arthur Williams. "The Times" complained of the "flatness and insipidity" of Burnand's text and of his vulgarising the original. "The Observer" was less censorious, finding the piece moderately amusing, and correctly predicting that it would run successfully until it had to make way for the annual Gaiety pantomime at Christmas.