Felipe Moreno

Felipe Moreno and Kiko, reproduced from The Oracle, March–April 1956. Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog.

Ask most people who taught Señor Wences to talk without moving his lips, and you'll get a story about a bullring, a ruined arm, and a doctor's orders. Ask the family, and they'll add a name that story usually leaves out. His older brother, Felipe.^[1] Felipe Moreno Centeno was born in Peñaranda de Bracamonte, in the Spanish province of Salamanca, in 1888, eight years ahead of Wenceslao.^[1][2] He spent very nearly fifty years working stages across Spain and France with a rag doll and a foul-mouthed parrot, turned down the kind of offers his little brother chased all the way to Ed Sullivan's stage, and never left home to do any of it. Pull up a chair. This is the Moreno almost nobody outside Spain ever wrote down.

Salamanca to the Circo Parish

The Morenos came out of Peñaranda de Bracamonte, a small town in Salamanca, and by more than one account they turned into one of the great ventriloquist families of Spain.^[8] Felipe came first. He was already working the ring at Madrid's Circo Parish, the circus everyone in the city just called Parish after the family that ran it, while Wenceslao was still a teenager recovering from a goring that ended his own run as a bullfighter.^[1][9] The doctors told the kid to exercise the arm. What the usual version of that story leaves out is that his own brother was already a working ventriloquist, and it was Felipe, by the Spanish record, who actually taught him the trade and stood beside him in that same ring.^[1][9] One brother went on to reduce the whole art down to a painted fist and take it to America. Before any of that, there were two brothers and one circus, and the older one was already on the bill.

The other road out of automata

Spain's ventriloquism in that era ran through a Valencian named Paco Sanz, who built a whole touring company out of life-size automata that walked and turned and shrugged their own shoulders.^[1] Felipe went the other way entirely. No automata, no company of mechanical figures. Just a small rag doll he called Ciriaquito.^[1] Smaller, cheaper, one man and one figure instead of a stage full of engineering. His younger brother reduced the idea again, down to a face drawn on his own hand, and conquered American television with it. Two generations, one Spanish family, and the whole history of the art's hardware running from Sanz's machines down to a fist, with Felipe and his rag doll standing right in the middle of that road.^[1]

The billing had a joke folded into it, and I love that somebody in that theater had the wit to use it. His own surname, Moreno, means dark-haired in Spanish. Felipe was blond. So the marquee sometimes read "el ventrílocuo musical ¿Moreno?", at the suggestion of the circus's own manager, Leonard Parish: the musical ventriloquist. Moreno? Question mark and all, teasing the man's hair color against his own last name.^[1] He earned the "musical" half honestly, too. He played violin, xylophone, and guitar, and by one account was a genuinely brilliant guitarist.^[1] Add in sleight of hand and a run of his own written sketches, one titled "De polo a polo," pole to pole, and you've got a man who never treated ventriloquism as his only trick.^[1] Contemporaries called him bohemian, "alma de niño y traza de dandy," a child's soul and a dandy's bearing. That's how Spain remembered him.^[1]

Kiko, and the club that took him in

By the 1950s Felipe had traded Ciriaquito's billing for a louder partner: a parrot puppet named Kiko, sharp-tongued enough that one write-up called him "el locuaz y mordaz loro Kiko," the talkative and biting parrot Kiko.^[10] The Oracle, the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists' own magazine, tracked him the way it tracked everybody working the trade. In January 1955 a Madrid correspondent named Eugenio Balder reported him "very active" and "giving splendid performances all over Spain."^[5] By March 1956 Felipe had joined the Brotherhood himself, listed at Calle de Lope de Rueda 10 in Madrid and introduced to the membership in one plain sentence: "a very talented Ventriloquist. He is like his famous brother, Senor Wences."^[6] Five years later, in 1950, when Wences himself passed through the Oracle's pages on a visit, the magazine noted he came "accompanied by his brother Felipe Moreno, Ventriloquist of South America."^[7] Felipe never worked south of France in his life. Touring correspondents scribbling notes between shows didn't always get every detail right, and that one's worth keeping exactly as printed: a small, honest mistake inside an otherwise accurate family record.

The one who stayed

Here's the part of the story that gives this whole page its shape. Wenceslao sailed for America in the mid-1930s and never really came back to live. Felipe had his own chances to do the same and turned most of them down.^[10] He retired sometime in the 1950s, never having worked anywhere but the country he'd started in nearly fifty years earlier, and died in Madrid on January 17, 1966.^[2][3] A collector named Tony Pérez, who has spent real time tracing Spain's ventriloquism history, rates Felipe as possibly more talented than his famous brother. Whether or not you take that all the way, Pérez owns the proof that the man kept creating right up to the end: an unstaged play in Felipe's own handwriting, called "El príncipe bobo," the foolish prince, that nobody ever put on a stage.^[1] One 2023 review of Spanish ventriloquism's history put both brothers in the same sentence, calling the Salamanca-born Morenos "de los mejores de la historia," among the best the country ever produced, Felipe named right alongside Wenceslao, not underneath him.^[10]

When a blog reader pressed the family in 2009 on whether either brother had secretly worked their figures with pneumatic bulb controls, Wences's own granddaughter, Marcela Moreno, settled it in one line: neither of them ever did. "Just plain old fashion and with their hands."^[3] Two brothers, one family record, and not a mechanism between them beyond what their own hands could do.

Matildita, and the parrot that became a raven

Felipe married the Spanish artist Matilde Vázquez, and the fullest family photographs this corpus holds on him come from that marriage: Ciriaquito dedicated in ink to their daughter, Matildita, in 1936, and a formal portrait of Felipe with Matilde herself, the kind of picture a family keeps rather than a theater.^[4] His sister Josefa's son grew up to become another working ventriloquist, José Luis Moreno, famous enough in his own right that a Spanish ventriloquist named Elvi, coming up decades later, named the whole Moreno family among his earliest influences.^[8] José Luis worked a raven puppet named Rockefeller. One 2023 review called that raven the spiritual heir to a talkative, biting parrot from a generation earlier: Felipe's own Kiko.^[10] A parrot becomes a raven, an uncle becomes an inheritance, and the family that stayed in Spain kept the bird act going two generations deep.

In 2023, when a performer named Jaime Figueroa brought ventriloquism back to Madrid's Circo Price, the same ring Felipe had once shared top billing on as the Circo Parish, the arts press covering it counted the years back to Felipe Moreno by name: sixty of them.^[10] He never took the act to Hollywood or Ed Sullivan's stage the way his brother did. He didn't need to. The reviewers in his own hometown circuit were still reaching for his name on their own, six decades after he'd worked that ring last.

Fifty years, one rag doll, and a parrot with a mouth on him, all without ever leaving Salamanca province. Meanwhile his little brother got the passport stamps and the painted fist got the postcards. Some of us just teach the trick and let somebody else take the bow.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy