Theatre
in the Canyon
Nestle into the Southern California hills for a magic-feeling theatre experience among the live oaks of Topanga Canyon.
Go winding into the Santa Monica Mountains for a live performance in an unexpected natural amphitheater.
Fold yourself into a canyon-side stay that has worked itself into the contours of the mountains
Dine creekside in the canyon, at a secret-feeling fairy-enclave of a place that encourages a prolonged lingering.
As always, your stay, meal and local experience are pre-arranged, booked for you in a tap.
Get the full story for the weekend.
Topanga, CA |Through August, 2026
Where you’re going: a Bohemian twist of the Santa Monica mountains that’s full of art, sound, soul, and all the flowers of Shakespeare.
Why here?
In the early 1950s, as a paranoiac Congress was trawling for communists at the height of the Red Scare, a successful stage and film actor named Will Geer was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
He was asked to provide names of old theatre friends who may have communist leanings. Geer declined.
“Do you consider yourself to be a patriotic citizen?,” his questioner pressed.
“I love it enough to want to make it better,” said the actor. The powerful Hollywood studio system promptly excommunicated him.
Read on or
Photo via Theatricum Botanicum
With no means of supporting themselves, Geer and his wife, the actress Herta Ware, sold their house in Santa Monica and slipped off to a corridor of seaside hills, just up the California coast, in a little crease of valley called Topanga Canyon.
They grew vegetables (Geer had a botany degree), they took on odd jobs, and on a gentle rake of land that leveled briefly to a wooded flat, they began to build their own sort of unblackballable performance space.
The couple’s talented friends, many of whom were also blacklisted artists and musicians, arrived to perform Shakespeare. Woody Guthrie moved in and wrote songs.
Photo by Carolyn Elliott, via Lucy Pollack Public Relations
Backstage at the theatre
Two decades later, as political conditions cooled, Will Geer returned to the screen (he was Grandpa Walton in The Waltons, and also portrayed the befurred mountain man Bear Claw in Jeremiah Johnson), and a succession of new artists and audiences found their way into the canyon.
With a little Hollywood money re-flowing, Will and Herta (especially Herta, who carried on the mission after Will’s death) set out to make the theatre in the trees real. There would be seats and wings and lighting. And a name: Theatricum Botanicum; garden theatre. The planks of the new stage were salvaged from a storm-wrecked Santa Monica pier, and the theatre itself was so enfolded by nature, that one tree was left to stand right in the middle of the stage.
We honestly can’t put a precise finger on why people like Will Geer and Herta Ware make us want to experience the physical somewhere at the center of a story.
There’s something in there beyond the obvious beauty of the trees, or the power of a performance in this space; there’s an unknown at work in the mix of bravery and botany, and of dark American history and Shakespeare.
Something about an on-stage tree and unbannable art that makes you want to haul up the coast and into the hills to find it all.
Will Geer & Herta Ware
Photo: Public Domain
This weekend in Topanga, discover…
The stay.
Photo via Topanga Canyon Inn
Topanga Canyon Inn
It’s almost a landform in itself, set into the Santa Monica Mountains, about a mile off Topanga Canyon Boulevard.
This place very much couldn’t care about being Malibu-polished or L.A.-slick; it is more country-house than hotel, with balconies, common rooms, breakfast in the dining room, and canyon views that do not quit.
Reservations made, suite pre-paid. Just arrive.
The day.
Musch Ranch Trail
You can start at Trippet Ranch, a former weekend estate and one of the main entrances to Topanga State Park, where an easy trail moves through the oaks, and into open chaparral with broad views across the Santa Monica Mountains. Take it for as long as feels good (even the first stretch gets you officially into canyon landscape).
And if you make the full two miles, Eagle Rock is at the end: a massive sandstone outcrop with caves worn into its face and views across the folded ridges toward the Pacific.
The find.
Image via Hidden Treasures; photo by Lizzie Rose Media
Hidden Treasures
Nowhere else comes close for this slot. Look at this place.
This was once the Discovery Inn, where Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Buffalo Springfield ate dinner after playing up the road. Now it's a totem-topped curio collection run by Darrell Hazen, that we will not attempt to summarize in any way.
The food.
Inn of the Seventh Ray
Drive up Old Topanga Canyon Road on Saturday evening and follow it to a creekside restaurant that has been here since the 1970s, on land thought to have once served as a Chumash meeting place. The cooking still carries some of Topanga’s early organic-food idealism, but the menu is a proper dinner: crispy shrimp cakes, grilled octopus, creamy black-truffle risotto, roasted sea bass and plum-braised short ribs, backed by a substantial list of organic and biodynamic wines.
There are candles and string lights flickering across the big sycamores, and it is a prime spot for a glass of wine and maybe slightly imagining running off into these woods, getting a garden going, putting on a show or writing a song—and giving something artful to the world.
Dinner reservations for Saturday evening, pre-show. Pre-paid.
Photo via the Inn of the Seventh Ray/Instagram
The tucked away.
The Adamson House
In Malibu, just outside the canyon, there’s a 1929 Spanish-Moorish beach house covered floor to ceiling in extraordinary decorative tile. And there is something a little incongruous about it, sitting right there by the rush of the PCH near the Malibu Pier.
There are intricately tiled fountains, vividly patterned bathrooms and the courtyard’s extraordinary 60-foot ceramic “Persian carpet,” made from 674 individually shaped tiles.
The home’s legendary inhabitant was the incredible May Rindge, who at one time owned 17,000 acres along this coast and spent decades fighting the state to keep the highway from tearing through the wilds.
Photo: cordera23
The evening mood.
Image via Theatricum Botanicum
Theatricum Botanicum
Saturday night takes you into the canyon for a performance at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum, the outdoor repertory theater that grew from the Topanga property where Geer and Herta Ware settled during the Hollywood blacklist. Their daughter Ellen Geer has led the company since 1978, preserving the family-run character of the place and honoring one ironclad instruction from her mother: never pave the parking lot.
The production changes with the date. Through Labor Day weekend, Saturday evenings rotate among Bernardo Cubría’s new comedy The People of Pompeii, a Gilded Age–set Romeo and Juliet, and Ellen Geer’s own adaptation of Treasure Island. All good options, but it’s possible you are really coming for the theater itself.
Your tickets are pre-paid,
All booked for you in a tap.
This Overnight includes:
Your one-night stay at Topanga Canyon Inn.
Tickets for an evening performance at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum.
Dinner among the sycamores, in the Puckish, fairy-light mood of Inn of the Seventh Ray. $175 food and drink credit for two travelers, $95 for one traveler.
So how does this work?
No payment is needed just yet. Request your reservation below, and we’ll make sure the weekend is ready on our end: then we’ll email you a secure payment link along with meal reservation times and event details (unless you’re on a strict schedule, let us arrange the times to ensure all the components flow together nicely. You just arrive).
Once you’re booked, we’ll send you all the key details: check-in, addresses, and reservation notes. For now, just let us know you’d like us to get going.
Additional photo credits:
"Musch Ranch Trail" by bcfaircloth is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
"Eagle Rock. Topanga State Park, California" by ChrisGoldNY is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.