Two icons of Black entertainment are sharing a Chicago stage this weekend when comedian Marsha Warfield and singer Martha Wash team up for a show called It's Raining Queens at City Winery Chicago on Saturday, October 3. Warfield, a South Side native, and Wash, the powerhouse voice behind some of dance music's biggest hits, will perform together at the West Loop venue in a pairing that blends stand-up comedy with disco and house music history.
The show marks a homecoming of sorts for Warfield, who grew up on Chicago's South Side and graduated from Calumet High School before finding national fame as tough bailiff Roz Russell on NBC's Night Court, a role she played from 1986 to 1992 and reprised in the show's 2023 reboot, according to Wikipedia. Warfield told ABC7 Chicago that she loves Chicago and cannot wait to return, and she said she will open the show with naughty, provocative and somewhat blasphemous humor. Before her television career, Warfield had already built serious comedy credentials, winning the 1979 San Francisco International Comedy Competition over fellow up-and-comers Dana Carvey and A. Whitney Brown, per Wikipedia.
A Voice Behind the Hits, Finally Seen
Wash described disco to ABC7 as happy music that made people want to dance. Her musical career actually started in the late 1970s as part of Two Tons O' Fun alongside Izora Armstead, singing backup for disco legend Sylvester before the pair renamed themselves The Weather Girls and landed the 1982 hit It's Raining Men — a history Hoodline detailed in a 2012 remembrance of Sylvester.
Wash's path took a strange turn in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the music industry used her voice while lip-syncing it in videos without showing her face, according to ABC7's report. Wash told the station that the practice caused an uproar, and her uncredited studio vocals were featured on 1990 dance tracks including C+C Music Factory's Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) and Black Box's Everybody Everybody. Wash sued RCA over a model lip-syncing to her vocals on Black Box songs, a case that resulted in a settlement agreement between Wash and RCA, according to the Los Angeles Times.
An Emmy Connection Runs Through the Controversy
The saga even shaped the career of one of the reporters covering this weekend's show. ABC7 entertainment anchor Hosea Sanders said Wash had three hit songs reach number one while her face was never shown, and he credited her with helping him win his first Emmy after he reported an award-winning series about the lip-syncing controversy while working as a reporter in Los Angeles. Wash, for her part, told ABC7 she eventually moved on from the controversy and pursued other activities.
Warfield's Homecoming Itinerary
Warfield has more planned for her Chicago trip than the stage at City Winery. She said she would visit the DuSable Museum whenever she comes to Chicago if she has enough time — a nod to an institution founded in 1961 by artist and educator Dr. Margaret Burroughs as the Ebony Museum of Negro History and Art, now recognized as the oldest independent Black history museum in the United States, per Britannica Kids. The museum relocated to its current Washington Park location in 1973, according to the same source.
She also mentioned wanting to take Dilla's Mahogany Tour of Bronzeville. That bus tour comes from Chicago historian Shermann “Dilla” Thomas, who launched Chicago Mahogany Tours in 2021; the tours focus on Chicago history.
The Venue
City Winery Chicago sits in the West Loop.
It's Raining Queens takes the City Winery Chicago stage Saturday, pairing Warfield's comedic homecoming with Wash's decades of dance-floor history in an intimate room built for exactly that kind of night.
