I’m having a similar issue, but it’s only switching out the apostrophe in the event title (everywhere else seems fine). I tried editing the php.ini file & adding the above php to the functions.php file …so far nothing has worked. Strange things.
I figured out how to change the WP global excerpt value (just search for ‘excerpt’ in functions.php and you’ll find it soon), but it would be nice if I could just customize through the plugin w/o having to mess with the global setting.