HE PARTIED LIKE IT’S 1999 - Theatre Production

When the world was supposed to end, their truths were just beginning.

He Partied Like It’s 1999 is an intergenerational tragicomedy about truth, desire, and the queer lives we build in the wreckage of the old world.

As the millennium approaches, ROSE, a sharp-tongued volunteer in a Footscray op shop, muses on lost keys, missing meaning, and the absurdity of modern life. When she meets LUCINDA, a young goth and queer archivist, their unlikely friendship opens a doorway between eras, the radical 1960s of Rose’s youth and the restless queer underground of 1999. Rose’s brittle humour hides a loneliness tied to her husband REG, who once marched beside her in anti-war protests but later left her… for a man.

Now living in St Kilda, Reg seeks spiritual guidance from ANGELA MERCY, a drag queen psychic and truth dealer who survived the AIDS crisis and her own broken faith in the world. Through Angela’s camp clairvoyance and acid wit, Reg begins to confront the parts of himself long buried under shame and suburban respectability.

Elsewhere, Lucinda’s partner RWANDA, a nurse, grapples with identity, bureaucracy, and belonging, battling both institutional prejudice and her own exhaustion from being perpetually misread. Their relationship, fragile and funny, mirrors the generational struggle between freedom and fear that haunts Rose and Reg.

And HUNTER, Reg’s new flame, who is living with HIV. Hunter shifts constantly between jobs. There’s a restlessness to him, a feeling that he’s still trying to locate a stable centre in his life. Beneath his brightness and tenderness sits a quieter truth, a persistent fear of death that shadows his days, shaping the way he moves through the world. For now, he remains adrift, yearning for something solid to hold on to.

Across op shops, hospital rooms, and late-night cafés, from Footscray’s grit to St Kilda’s faded glamour, these characters circle each other through time, connected by the echoes of protest, disco, and desire. They debate gay marriage, flirt over black cardigans, mourn the lovers and ideals lost to time, and find solace in the strange poetry of survival.

When Rose and Reg reunite, their waltz through memory becomes a reconciliation with the past, and a recognition that love takes many forms, none of them tidy. The play ends not with apocalypse, but with acceptance. Of queerness, of change, of the messy continuity between decades and desires.

Infused with camp irreverence, biting humour, and heartfelt tenderness, He Partied Like It’s 1999 is both elegy and celebration. It honours those who danced through oppression, those who marched for love, and those who continue to find themselves reflected in the mirror ball light of history. As the century ticks over, the characters realise the world may not end, but it will never be the same.