“Are you making a kissy face, Max?” Shereen Ahmed is blushing as she leans into her Zoom window to ask a question of her co-star, Max von Essen.

“Yeah, I think I am going to close my eyes,” he replies. Then he leans into blank space with puckered lips.

She does the same, becoming half of a Norman Rockwell valentine, and the primal act of musical theater, the ingénue kissing the juvenile, has taken place — only with the actors hundreds of miles apart, locked down in their apartments, acting into their iPhones, while the rest of us in the cast watch from our own muted Zoom squares.

We 13 actors had come together for two weeks to create a full-length, fully “produced” remote version of the classic holiday season musical “Meet Me in St. Louis” for the Irish Repertory Theater, which will stream it starting Dec. 11.

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