Not going to get specific with code, but I've used a room in a music video setting. The actual game also uses the same rooom. Reuse requires code to move things in and out of the room, and it seems error prone. Looks like my safest/simplest solution is going to be to make a duplicate of the room, rather than try to reuse the room. This rankles my limited programming skills and the belief in writing once and reusing often. Opinions?
I'd create a second room. You can save space by drawing the room background to the room's DrawingSurface in room_Load(), that way AGS won't needlessly store the background twice.