It’s a sprawling nightmare of a ballet, complicated and crowded with incidents, heavy with expressions of pain and loss and pitiable confusion. It enthrals and it alienates, enchants and exhausts.

I’m talking, of course, about “Princess and the Pea,” the main event of the Joffrey Ballet’s mixed-repertory bill on now at the Lyric Opera. Choreographer Dani Rowe and librettist Garen ...