Americanboy, I'd kill to see Marisa Tomei play the Baker's Wife! Talk about someone who can be hilarious, nuanced and bring the right amount of pathos to the role. She has flirted with musicals for a while too and I wonder if maybe she's not the best singer, she was fired from that awful SWEET CHARITY revival (as was her replacement, brilliant Jane Krakowski, so that doesn't mean much about her musical abilities) and she was turned down for Roxie in the CHICAGO film.
My top three choices are three very different actresses: Marisa Tomei (such a great idea, Americanboy), Debra Messing, and Toni Collette. Something tells me it won't be any of them since I'm awful at predicting this sort of thing, but I'm excited.
Something about Kate Winslet as the Baker's Wife, as much as I love her, doesn't excite me as much as so many of the other choices brought up on this thread. Perhaps it's residual damage from the unwatchable CARNAGE film adaptation, but I'd rather see her in an adaptation of A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC or as Sally in FOLLIES ten years from now.
"Some people can thrive and bloom living life in a living room, that's perfect for some people of one hundred and five. But I at least gotta try, when I think of all the sights that I gotta see, all the places I gotta play, all the things that I gotta be at"