THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE ROSE: Christopher Wheeldon has made a piece of poetry for the stage.

First of all, the production is gaudily expensive, a visual hodgepodge that breaks up dance patterns and actions that might otherwise be clear. In the Prologue, costume designer Willa Kim pits fairies in spangled gumdrop-colored tutus against an entourage of powdery pastels. The interweaving designs of the Garland Dance look jumbled because the peasants wear goldenrod costumes with turquoise sleeves, and you can’t tell which arms belong to which bodies. In act three, when the courtiers wake up in the 18th century, they wear extremely elaborate, sculpted white-and-gold period costumes that look awkward when anybody sits down. Tony Walton’s scenery alternates between dreamy forests and gaudy throne rooms.

More distracting to me were the scenario and character elements injected into the story. Carabosse, as played for half of Saturday evening by Gelsey Kirkland, was a grande dame of the theater, raging and rampaging through Aurora’s christening scene. Kirkland’s acting, though out of scale, was truly majestic, physically invested at every moment, and psychologically motivated. She didn’t appear after the intermission because of an injury (Kristi Boone substituted for her), but Carabosse’s demented fury, unabated after Aurora’s centuries-long sleep, twisted into an inscrutable plot to ensnare Prince Desirée in a giant spider web made out of what looked to me like the evil fairy’s entrails.

The collaborators dredged up an extinct Sleeping Beauty plot involving a river of tears shed by Aurora’s mother — where have I heard that before? Swan Lake? — with an ensuing scene for the Prince that interrupted the hunting scene. These new turns of the plot — and even the small ellipses, like the omission of all the third-act divertissements except the famous Bluebird pas de deux — kept claiming my attention, thwarting my expectations. Neither the story nor the dances built in any sustained way. Lasting three hours with only one intermission, the ballet seemed to have no real momentum. It just went from well-preserved gem to eccentric appendage and back again all evening.

I was hoping to see Diana Vishneva in the one performance I was able to attend, but she canceled, and that necessitated the substitution not only of Paloma Herrera as Aurora but of Ángel Corella for Vishneva’s partner David Hallberg, who had been substituting for the injured Vladimir Malakhov. And so forth. It was the end of Sleeping Beauty’s run in the Metropolitan Opera House season, and for all I know, the bad reviews had demoralized everybody.

Herrera was a perfectly behaved but bland Aurora. She cranked up her considerable technique for some spectacular things in the last act, probably spurred on by Corella, whose dynamism and real charm got the audience excited. Sarah Lane and Carlos Lopez (also substituting for the announced dancers) had warmed the audience up for them in the Bluebird pas de deux. Stella Abrera’s Lilac Fairy was a cipher despite her role as presiding benefactress. The production retained much of Sleeping Beauty’s fine dancing, but the repetitious group choreography, the lack of individualism in the solo dancers, and the excruciatingly stately behavior of the royals bogged down whatever survived its scenic and narrative excesses.