[Boston.pm] converting utf-8 to unicode from XML text gathered by XML::Twig

Hi All,
I am currently using XML::Twig to read in some XML.
This XML's text is in utf-8.
So there are smart-quotes and such in there.
I need to unicode-ify the text.
I tried using most of the methods that are part of XML::Twig, but came up
dry.
The best I could do is convert all unsupported chars to question marks.
Without any XML::Twig conversion the smart quotes come out looking
like: “ ” or ’
I tried doing a simple $val =~ s/’/'/gs;
But that didn't work either.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can do this conversion either
manually OR with XML::Twig methods?

Thanks.
--Alex