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Karine Seneca’s injury prompted the company to bring in guest artist Patricia Barker, a principal from Pacific Northwest Ballet who was the dream Clara in the 1986 Carroll Ballard film Nutcracker: The Motion Picture and Titania in the 1999 PNB film of George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as one of its Lilac Fairies. Barker has glorious port de bras and timing, and you can read her mime from the back of the Wang, but her dancing was subdued (only a couple of Italian fouettés), and she was a slightly brittle presence. Saturday afternoon, a worried-looking Atkins seemed to struggle even with steps that are well within her range, and she didn’t attempt the fouettés. Once past the Prologue (where the Lilac Fairy does all her serious dancing), she radiated her usual warmth, both sexual and maternal. Jennifer Glaze’s Carabosse is an unwanted intruder from the Real World whose gift of a jeweled distaff confounds the King and Queen (they appear never to have handled anything having to do with work); she’s as necessary to Aurora’s future as is the Lilac Fairy, and in Glaze’s performance hardly less sympathetic. On Friday, Viktor Plotnikov was more adversarial; I missed the feeling of thwarted sisterhood that only a woman can provide.

Act I is anchored by the Garland Dance and the Rose Adagio. In the 1994 Royal Beauty that’s preserved on video, the Garland Dance looks effete and underpopulated, but the 12 ladies fill the Wang stage with no difficulty, their bustling beatitude and concentric circles compensating for the absence of cute children. It’s less a village celebration and more an anticipation of Aurora’s imminent womanhood. Thursday, Lorna Feijóo brought power and panache to Aurora, kicking out developpés à la seconde as if she were a Rockette and pausing on unsupported pointe as if deciding whether to take the next suitor’s hand. Her footwork — the ronds de jambes in her variation, for example — has sharp definition but she’s never choppy, and like Trinidad Sevillano, who danced Aurora for Boston Ballet in 1993, she makes not being tall and thin irrelevant. On Friday, Larissa Ponomarenko, reprising her Aurora from the past three Boston Ballet productions, was more innocent and poetic, teasing her suitors but not twisting them around her finger the way Feijóo does, letting herself sink into the music, varying the speed of her manège, focusing more on flow than on point. Saturday afternoon, in her first-ever Aurora, soloist Romi Beppu fluttered and flickered and waited exquisitely on Tchaikovsky’s subversive, off-balance beats, a butterfly one moment, a firefly the next. If her equilibres weren’t the equal of Feijóo’s (credit her suitor quartet of Michael Johnson, Sabi Varga, Mindaugas Bauzys, and Luke Luzicka for helping out), that was quickly lost in the delicacy of her developpés.

Act II of The Sleeping Beauty finally introduces the Prince, as part of a hunting party that includes a Countess who’d like to be a Princess. Melanie Atkins was all solicitude, her Countess, like her Lilac Fairy, equal parts aspiring wife and mother. Sacha Wakelin seemed to aspire more to social status, a less appealing interpretation but not a less legitimate one. Once the hunting party exits, the Prince, like Siegfried in Swan Lake, is left to dance out his unfulfilled yearnings to still more "unbalanced" music that found last weekend’s trio — Nelson Madrigal, Roman Rykine, and Reyneris Reyes — all struggling for perfection. Madrigal was the most boyish of the lot, Rykine the most aristocratic, Reyes the most gallant. The Vision Scene that follows is both the Prince’s vision of Aurora, as presented by the Lilac Fairy, and Aurora’s dream of the Prince during her hundred years’ sleep, so they’re aware of each other and yet not. Beppu and Reyes, helped no little by a touchingly protective Atkins, found the best balance here. The rest of the act is a tableau: the Lilac Fairy takes the Prince in her boat to the castle, dispatches Carabosse with a glance, and directs him to Aurora. It looked much the same with all three casts; Beppu at least seemed curious about her instant husband.

Act III offers a series of fairy-tale-character divertissements and a pas de deux for Aurora and the Prince sandwiched between a polonaise and a mazurka. Petipa and Tchaikovsky also created a Jewel Fairy (Gold, Silver, Sapphire, Diamond) pas de quatre; this production has instead a pas de trois for a man and two women whose anonymity in the company of Puss’n Boots and Red Riding Hood seems misguided. Mindaugas Bauzys was enigmatic but elegant with a gratifying Rie Ichikawa and a buoyant Kathleen Breen Combes who kicked hard in the 5/4 Sapphire variation (Petipa and Tchaikovsky thinking of a five-faceted gem). Pavel Gurevich looked less focused partnering a diligent Sacha Wakelin and a Melanie Atkins who didn’t crackle like Combes but did catch the 5/4 flow. Jared Redick was poised and attentive with a credible Heather Myers and Tempe Ostergren.

The character divertissements include a brief pas de deux for Princess Florine and the Bluebird. As Florine on opening night, Beppu glittered, but Reyes as her Bluebird looked top-heavy in his costume and seemed to have no elevation — it was as if she were teaching him to fly instead of the other way round. Reyes has shown what he can do as the Prince; this was just a case of miscasting. Mindaugas Bauzys was better but still didn’t look like winged victory, and Adriana Suárez didn’t have the precision to go with her poetry. It was corps members Misa Kuranaga and Benjamin Griffiths who at the Saturday matinee showed how this should go, the slighter, lighter Griffiths looking just right in the costume, jackknifing through the temps de poisson positions in his brisés volés diagonals, and even finding some humor in the role, Kuranaga less extroverted and exuberant than Beppu, a true fledgling. In their concluding temps de flèche diagonal they were a real couple, not just two dancers doing the same steps.

Of the three Puss’n Boots–White Cat pairs I saw, Matteo Klemmayer and Kelley Potter were marginally the cattiest. Red Riding Hood is a smaller part, only 90 seconds of skittering about, but with her silent-movie-star affect and over-articulated movements, Alexandra Kochis (with a very capable Patrick Thornberry as her Wolf) made it a highlight of the weekend.

The Sleeping Beauty is the most classic, and often the most demanding, of the classic ballets. The cleaner lines of the Royal Ballet production demand cleaner dancing; Boston Ballet’s corps last weekend was excellent, and in a performance full of technical felicities on Thursday Feijóo’s minuscule slip isn’t worth mentioning, but there was more than the occasional bobble in the other major roles. It’s not that the company’s previous productions have been sharper, but the likes of Trinidad Sevillano, Patrick Armand, Paul Thrussell, Natasha Akhmarova, Jennifer Gelfand, Pollyana Ribeiro, Rob Wallace, and Kyra Strasberg brought to their roles personality as well as technique. That’s the kind of balance no Sleeping Beauty can do without.