I just finished taking a class taught by Cheri Coons on empowered female characters in musicals. Cheri is a wonderful teacher, very much focussed on how musicals are structured. She suggests various ways to think about the general structure of the story. For example, there are some shows where you begin with one family, and at the end, a new family has been created. Others are stories about repairing a divided world.
In Mimosa, there are ostensibly two worlds when the show opens: The plant world, and the human world. We learn in the opening narration that there had a plant called Scrub Rose who life was so intertwined with lives of the humans of the town of Scrub Rose, that plant and humans shared a single spirit. But when the humans forgot Scrub Rose was their companion, and not a commodity, they lost sight of that connection. The friendship between the protagonist, Mimosa, a plant, and Molly, a human, reminds them, showing them the way to restore their world.
At first glance, this seems to be a story about repairing a divided world. It’s not. II can’t be. Humans and plants don’t live in separate worlds. Mimosa is a story about remembering and re-cognizing our inescapable interconnectedness.