The Lee Theatre was completed in 1925 in the Beaux-Arts style, its ornate facade facing onto Percival Street in a neighbourhood that, at the time, was still developing its identity as a commercial hub. Upon opening, Hong Kong Tramways launched a special late-night service to carry theatregoers home to Shek Tong Tsui — a sign of how immediately the venue became part of the city's rhythm. The theatre supposedly opened to business on 10 February 1927. Over the following decades, it hosted Cantonese opera, concerts, and films, serving the full range of what entertainment meant to Hong Kong audiences. Miss Hong Kong pageants ran there annually from 1973 until the late 1980s, organized by TVB, in which the Lee family held a stake. The Miss Universe pageant came in 1976.

Three names recur whenever people speak of the Lee Theatre: Roman Tam, Teresa Teng, and Liza Wang. All three performed on its stage, and all three were, at different moments, the defining popular voices of Chinese-speaking Asia. Tam's connection to the theatre was especially personal — he gave the farewell concert when the building closed in 1991, a final goodbye that RTHK's Television Division also commemorated with a special programme. The theatre renovated in the 1970s, updating its facilities while keeping the Beaux-Arts bones that made it visually distinctive. By the 1980s, though, the context had changed. Property prices in Hong Kong were rising sharply, and the land on Percival Street had become extraordinarily valuable.

The Lee family sold the land to Hysan Development, their corporate arm, in March 1991. The theatre closed four months later, on 19 August 1991. What drove the decision was straightforward: prime Causeway Bay real estate had become too valuable to use as a theatre. The site was redeveloped into Lee Theatre Plaza, a commercial building completed in 1995. It included a cinema, which itself closed and was converted to a restaurant in 2005. The original theatre left no physical trace at street level. What remained was the name, attached now to a building that shares nothing with its predecessor except a location.

A replica facade of the original Lee Theatre was installed at the Hong Kong History Museum — a gesture toward preservation that is also an honest acknowledgment of loss. The real building is gone; what survives is a reconstruction inside a museum, which is perhaps the most Hong Kong outcome imaginable for a beloved structure lost to redevelopment. The story of the Lee Theatre is not unusual in the city's history. Many buildings with comparable cultural weight have been demolished for comparable reasons. What makes this one persist in memory is partly the names associated with it, partly the music, and partly the simple fact that Roman Tam stood on its stage one last time and sang it goodbye.