THIS Olivier and Tony award-winning West End and Broadway musical is in Leeds this week on its first British tour. Let's hope we can feel the earth move in York on the next tour, which must surely follow.

You will know the songs, even if you don't know the story of Carole King, and while Douglas McGrath's book for Beautiful is not the full tapestry – no mention of her flop 1970 debut solo album Writer, and where's James Taylor? – it captures the spirit and courage of her ceaseless creativity with warmth, wit, pathos and glorious Jewish humour in her exchanges with her sage mother Genie (Carol Royle), a Manhattan teacher.

This magic carpet ride of a show is more than a jukebox musical because its script does not merely serve the songs. The sharp and sassy dialogue moves at a lick, built around the recording studio, record company offices, the home and the concert hall, bookended by Bronté Barbé's Carole King alone on stage at the piano.

Beautiful opens with ordinary schoolgirl Carole Klein writing incessantly at 16, landing her first songwriting deal with Donnie Kirshner as Carole King. Whoosh, she meets lyricist Gerry Goffin (Kane Oliver Parry); whoosh, soon she is pregnant and married at 17, and the hits keep coming for The Drifters (Up On The Roof/On Broadway), The Shirelles (Will You Love Me Tomorrow), even their babysitter Little Eva (The Locomotion).

Warts and not quite all, the story soft-soaps Goffin's wayward straying (and drug abuse), but captures Goffin and King's friendly rivalry with fellow songwriters Barry Mann (Matthew Consalves) and Cynthia Weil (Amy Ellen Richardson). And as Goffin strays further and further away, so the crowning glory of King's solo rise takes shape with all those fabulous Tapestry songs, from It's Too Late to (You Make Me Feel) Like A Natural Woman, sung magnificently by the very natural Barbé.

Move the earth to see this Beautiful show before it's too late.

Beautiful, The Carole King Musical, Leeds Grand Theatre, tonight at 7.30pm; tomorrow, 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: 0844 848 2700 or at leedsgrandtheatre.com