There may be no Broadway address better suited to The Rocky Horror Show than Studio 54. Richard O’Brien’s musical is a celebration of appetite, costume, theatrical excess and the liberating possibilities of becoming someone else after dark. Studio 54, before it became a Broadway theater, built a mythology around roughly the same ideas. Putting the show inside the former nightclub feels less like booking a venue than arranging a reunion between two legends of nocturnal New York.

The current Broadway revival has been playing at Studio 54 since spring, bringing Brad, Janet, Frank-N-Furter and the rest of the castle back to a commercial theater district that has changed dramatically since the musical first emerged in London in 1973. The show’s plot remains cheerfully flimsy: an innocent couple gets stranded, enters a mansion and discovers a world of sexual and scientific experimentation presided over by a host in spectacular heels. Plot is not the point. Permission is.

That distinction explains the work’s extraordinary durability. Rocky Horror became culturally enormous not because audiences sat quietly and admired its dramaturgy but because they learned to participate. The film adaptation inspired midnight rituals, costumes, shouted responses and generations of viewers who treated spectatorship as a performance. It turned a failed initial movie release into one of the great audience-created institutions of popular culture.

Live theater complicates that tradition in productive ways. A Broadway performance is not a midnight movie screening, and the relationship between sanctioned participation and disruption requires some negotiation. Yet the essential transaction remains. Rocky Horror wants the audience to feel that decorum is temporary. The evening works by steadily reducing the distance between the respectable people who entered the theater and the creatures who have taken over the stage.

The room changes the story

Studio 54 supplies its own ghost chorus. The building opened as an opera house in the 1920s, became a television studio and then, in 1977, the nightclub whose name became shorthand for disco-era glamour, celebrity and exclusion. Roundabout Theatre Company has operated it as a Broadway venue since the late 1990s. Few rooms in New York have moved so completely between definitions of entertainment while keeping the same address.

The revival’s casting has embraced the show’s variety-show potential. Rachel Dratch has served as Narrator, and Rosie O’Donnell is scheduled to step into that role for a limited stretch in October. The narrator is especially suited to guest casting because the part stands partly outside the fever dream, giving a performer room to establish a relationship with the audience before the story sweeps onward.

What once looked dangerous inevitably changes when it becomes canonical. Rocky Horror merchandise can now be bought by people whose parents were not born when the show premiered. Its once-transgressive images have entered the mainstream vocabulary of Halloween, drag and pop culture. But theater can restore a little danger simply by putting bodies in the same room. A costume on a screen is an image. A performer standing a few yards away in that costume is a proposition.

The Rocky Horror Show is currently playing at Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St. Rosie O’Donnell is scheduled to appear as the Narrator Oct. 6 through Oct. 18 while Rachel Dratch takes a brief hiatus.

The score has survived because it is unusually efficient at converting spectators into accomplices. “Time Warp” does not ask for scholarly attention. It gives instructions. The songs are catchy enough to exist outside the plot, which is one reason the work could migrate from stage to film to midnight ritual and back again. Each format changes the etiquette while preserving the invitation to join.

Studio 54 sharpens the theme of spectatorship in another way. The original nightclub was famous not simply for what happened inside but for the drama of getting inside. The door created an audience before the audience reached the dance floor. Broadway reverses the mechanism: buy a ticket and admission is assured, but the fantasy of crossing into a permissive nocturnal world remains part of the building’s mythology.

That mythology can become kitsch if handled too reverently. Rocky Horror has no interest in reverence. Its healthiest relationship to the past is playful, promiscuous and loud. The production does not need Studio 54 to become 1977 again, any more than the musical needs audiences to experience 1973. It needs the room to feel, for a couple of hours, like a place where ordinary rules have become negotiable.